Never Surrender

by John Kelly

  There was some discussion about how the new report, British Strategy in the Near Future, differed from the day-old British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality. Then, almost imperceptibly, the war cabinet slipped into one of the most consequential debates in British history. It is time to “face the facts,” Halifax told the cabinet as the city outside the window gathered for prayer. “It is no longer a question of imposing complete defeat on Germany but of safeguarding our own empire and, if possible, that of France.” This was a long way from “Victory! Victory at all costs!” In so many words, Halifax was saying if the only choices available to Britain were invasion or a compromise peace, a compromise peace might be preferable, even if it involved some territorial concessions. Halifax also told the cabinet that during his talk with Signore Bastianini the day before he had informed the Italian ambassador that “Britain would . . . be prepared to consider any proposal that led to a secure peace in Europe, provided our liberty and security were assured.” Churchill pounced on that last sentence.

  Peace and security were insufficient, he said. “We must ensure our complete liberty and independence. Any negotiation which might lead to a derogation of our rights and power” would be unacceptable. Despite the emphatic tone, Churchill was not saying that he opposed a negotiated settlement; only one that “might lead to a derogation of our rights and power.” In part, the note of ambiguity may have been a ploy by a politically vulnerable prime minister. A very hard line could incite a cabinet revolt by Halifax and the other “wise old elephant,” Chamberlain.

  After Churchill concluded, the conversation wandered off in other directions, but Halifax was not finished yet. He had been particularly struck by one of the observations in Certain Eventuality: the RAF’s ability to defend the British sky would be the most vital element of national survival. Toward the end of the cabinet, Halifax turned the observation into a question. If the Chiefs of Staff were right about airpower, he asked, how would the RAF’s ability to maintain air superiority be affected if France and Belgium capitulated and Germany was left “free to switch the bulk of her efforts to air production”? The question highlighted what would emerge as a fundamental point of difference between the prime minister and the foreign secretary in the coming days. Halifax believed that if there were to be a negotiation, better to hold it now while Britain’s military assets were still largely intact and could be used as a bargaining chip, while Churchill wished to demonstrate Britain’s resolve and strength in a final Götterdämmerung battle that would put those assets at risk.

  The other members of the war cabinet contributed little to the morning debate. A few days earlier, Chamberlain had noted in his diary that if France fell, “we should be fighting only for better terms, not for victory.” But this morning all he had to offer were random observations. At one point he noted that Mussolini “might send an ultimatum to France very shortly, saying that unless she would agree to a conference, Italy would come in on Germany’s side.” At another point he wondered if it was “possible to ask the French whether Italy could be bought off.” The lack of focus might have been health-related. In late May, Chamberlain was experiencing the first symptoms of what would prove to be terminal cancer.

  When the cabinet meeting ended a little before ten o’clock so the ministers could attend the Prayer Day service at Westminster Abbey, no one except Halifax had spoken in favor of a negotiated settlement, but no one, including Churchill, had firmly closed the door to negotiation.

  * * *

  Despite the rain, the police predictions of a large turnout for the Prayer Day service proved accurate. By the time the service began at 10:00 a.m., the nave of Westminster Abbey was full and the crowd had spilled out of the abbey’s great west front, down the stairs, and across the street to the old Westminster Hospital, which had recently been converted into a YMCA and was now guarded by machine guns. The increasing militarization of the imperial capital depressed Vera Brittain, who felt the “barricades and heaps of sand bags . . . barb-wire entanglements and machine gun emplacements [had] transformed familiar streets dominated for centuries by peace and prosperity” into battle stations.

  “Hullo, Winnie”s and “Good luck”s greeted Churchill outside the abbey, but the shouts quickly died away. The rain, the war, the fear for friends and loved ones in France—people were in a somber mood that morning. Inside the abbey, the congregants took their seats amid stained glass windows, the tombs of the good and great, and the mildewy odor of damp clothing. The king, sleek and handsome in a midnight-blue Royal Navy uniform, sat in the chancel (a section of the altar) between his plump little Scottish queen and the royal couple’s guest, the exiled Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, whose bourgeois habit of wheeling her own baby carriage had recently produced snickers in certain quarters of London. The suave air chief Cyril Newall, Admiral Dudley Pound—his jacket sleeves spangled with gold service stripes almost all the way up to the elbows—and a dozen other prominent military and civilian dignitaries took their places in the choir stalls adjacent to the chancel. Surveying the congregants amid the swelling choral music, Churchill “could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear, not fear . . . of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the ruin of Britain.” The observation probably said more about Churchill’s state of mind than the British people’s on May 26. Nonetheless, Prayer Day did produce many memorable and moving scenes: industrial workers in the Midlands and North of England, praying on loading docks and at lathes; and in front of the abbey itself, several hundred people standing in light spring rain, singing the national anthem. The next day the papers would say that the worshippers had prayed “for the men of the Allied forces . . . for the peoples on whom the terrors of invasion have fallen, for the victory of right and truth,” and most of Britain did pray for those things, but not all of Britain. Even in the most solemn hours of national life, human nature is never entirely righteous.

  This observation inspired poet John Betjeman’s “In Westminster Abbey,” an ode to the London society woman at prayer in wartime.

  Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans

  Spare their women for Thy Sake

  And if that is not too easy

  We will pardon Thy mistake.

  But Gracious Lord, what’er shall be,

  Don’t let anyone bomb me.

  Keep our Empire undismembered

  Guide our forces by Thy Hand,

  Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,

  Honduras and Togoland;

  Protect them Lord in all their fights,

  And even more, protect the whites.

  . . . Now I feel a little better,

  What a treat to hear Thy Word,

  Where the bones of leading statesmen

  Have so often been interr’d.

  And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait

  Because I have a luncheon date.

  About an hour after the Westminster Abbey service, a large black automobile appeared in the courtyard of Admiralty House, the rear door opened, and Paul Reynaud stepped out and into the beating heart of the British Empire. Directly to the north, Nelson’s Column rose above Trafalgar Square; directly to the south lay Downing Street, the Foreign Office, the Cenotaph, and the Horse Guards Parade Ground; and looming up before Reynaud, in all its somber majesty, was Admiralty House. Four stories high and nearly a city block long, the building, which spoke of power, but in a low, cultivated voice, came as close as any physical structure could to embodying the amour propre of the British Empire.

  There are three versions of why Reynaud visited London on May 26. In the French War Committee’s version, the purpose was to seek France’s release from the no-separate-peace agreement with Britain. In Reynaud’s version, the visit was prompted by a telegram from the French ambassador in Rome, François Poncet, who had warned that Mussolini was preparing to march but might still be dissuaded by territorial concessions. The third explanation comes from Reynaud’s military aide, Colonel de Villelume. De Villelume claims the trip was mad
e at his suggestion and that Reynaud’s intention was to propose that the Allies ask Italy to mediate an armistice agreement with Germany. All three accounts contained a measure of truth, though when Reynaud arrived in London on the late morning of the twenty-sixth only the second version was completely true.

  Over lunch with Churchill at Admiralty House, Reynaud painted the Allied position in the blackest of colors: Paris under assault by 150 German divisions; Britain pummeled night and day by massive German bomber fleets based on the Channel coast only forty or fifty miles from southern England; the blockade weapon fatally compromised by German conquests and the Nazi-Soviet pact; an isolationist United States unwilling and unable to provide military assistance. Finally, Reynaud came to Italy. He said an Italian attack would be fatal for France, which had lost its best divisions and most modern equipment in the battle in the North. Then Reynaud presented what amounted to the Reynaud plan: The Allies would offer Mussolini a quid pro quo. In return for territorial concessions, Italy would pledge to remain neutral. The point of the deal was to free up troops. The Germans were certain to turn on Paris once Dunkirk fell, and the agreement would allow France to move ten divisions from its border with Italy north to meet the expected assault. Before rising from the table, Churchill asked Reynaud, who had “dwelt not obscurely upon [a] possible French withdrawal from the war . . . if any peace terms had been offered him.” No, Reynaud said, but the French “knew they could get an offer, if they wanted one.”

  * * *

  When the war cabinet convened a little after 2:00 p.m. on the afternoon of May 26 Churchill briefed his colleagues on the Reynaud plan. The advantage of the plan was that it would provide more divisions for the defense of Paris; the disadvantage was the price. In return for a neutrality pledge, the Duce would probably demand British as well as French concessions, including “the neutralization of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, the demilitarization of Malta, and the limitation of naval forces in the Mediterranean.” Just describing the concessions was so unbearable that Churchill suddenly swelled with emotion and swore that Britain “would never give in. We would rather go down fighting . . . than be enslaved by Germany.” He went on in this vein for several minutes; then the outburst ended as abruptly as it had began, and he asked Halifax to visit Reynaud at Admiralty House. At this point the recording secretary drew a veil over the cabinet’s deliberations, noting simply that “a further discussion ensued on whether we should make any approach to Italy.” When the veil lifted, Halifax was still in his seat and was telling the cabinet, “The last thing Mussolini wanted was to see Herr Hitler dominating Europe. He would be anxious, if he could, to persuade Herr Hitler to take a more reasonable attitude.” This was the closest Halifax had come to saying what had been implicit in his earlier discussions of the Italian approach: it was a pathway to talks with Germany.

  Churchill, whose subtlety is often overlooked, chose not to challenge the foreign secretary. On a day when the BEF was facing annihilation and France was near collapse, he seemed to sense it was best to keep his pitch low. After Halifax finished, Churchill said that he “doubted whether anything would come of the approach to Italy but . . . the matter was one which the war cabinet would have to consider.”

  Halifax remained in his seat long enough to hear Arthur Greenwood give the cabinet a wildly inaccurate analysis of Germany’s economic weakness. Then he excused himself and went to Admiralty House to talk to Reynaud. The only record of that conversation is the summary Halifax prepared later, and nowhere to be found in it is the Reynaud who had come to London seeking a way to keep Italy neutral. Indeed, Halifax’s Reynaud sounds remarkably like Halifax. The most probable explanation for this is that, during their talk, Halifax described his version of the Italian approach, and Reynaud found it superior to his, in which France grants large territorial concessions simply for the right to move ten divisions from its Italian front. Reynaud’s use of the term “just and durable peace” also betrays the hand of Halifax, who had used that phrase in his talk with Signore Bastianini.

  In fairness to Halifax, he was not the only cabinet member guilty of manipulation on Prayer Day. As Air Chief Cyril Newall had noted at the morning cabinet, the new Chiefs of Staff paper commissioned by Churchill, British Strategy in the Near Future, was essentially a redo of the barely day-old Certain Eventuality. But there was an important difference between the two papers. Military reports are often based on a set of assumptions—for example, the enemy will deploy X number of divisions in battle. In Near Future, Churchill asked the Chiefs of Staff to factor into their analysis several assumptions that they did not use in Certain Eventuality, among them that the BEF reached Dunkirk safely (far from certain on the afternoon of May 26) and that “prolonged British resistance might be very dangerous for a Germany engaged in holding down the greater part of Europe.” (This was very close to a pipe dream. By late 1940, Germany headed an economic bloc of 290 million with a GDP greater than either that of the United States or the British Empire.) The new assumptions did not change the chiefs’ conclusions about Britain’s prospects, but they did give the new report a different tone. In Eventuality, the most the chiefs were prepared to offer was pinched hope: “It is impossible to say whether or not the United Kingdom could hold out in all circumstances. We think there are good grounds for the belief that the British people will endure the greatest strain, if they realize as they are beginning to do—that the existence of the Empire is at stake.” In Near Future, the hope is unqualified and the chiefs’ tone, personal. “Prima facie Germany has most of the cards, but the real test is whether the morale of our fighting personnel and civil population will counterbalance the numerical and material advantages Germany enjoys. We believe it will.”

  But was that “We believe it will” the Chiefs’ unbiased military opinion, or was Churchill hiding behind the curtain, playing ventriloquist?

  According to Christopher Hill, professor of international relations at Cambridge, Churchill knew that if he hoped to “lead the Cabinet toward the unbending resistance [to Germany]” he’d had in mind since the outset, he could not allow doubts to grow. He thus employed the classic political tactic of asking for another paper when the first did not come up to his expectations and loaded the dice in the language of his brief (a reference to the positive assumptions in Near Future). This episode also highlights some of the other ways Churchill kept the senior military men in line. “The COS [Chiefs of Staff] had reserved their right to change their view when they saw the paper,” notes Professor Hill, but it was too late, “given its presentation to the Cabinet, which was the purpose from Churchill’s point of view. This and the fact that the Confidential Annexes to the paper went missing shortly after the war suggest that the PM had maneuvered his military advisors for political purposes.”

  On occasion, Churchill also used manipulation to keep his Cabinet colleagues committed to the war. For example, he took the somewhat unusual step of circulating his correspondence with Roosevelt to the cabinet. The president had no intention of bringing the United States into the war, but, reading his words of support, the other members of the cabinet could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The prime minister’s maximalist, never surrender! rhetoric also had the effect of committing his cabinet colleagues to a policy that had never been formally agreed upon. With everything at stake, Churchill was playing the deep game.

  * * *

  The final event of this momentous afternoon was the informal cabinet meeting Churchill convened at Admiralty House after Reynaud left. Unusually, the first fifteen minutes were not recorded; allegedly, the secretary, Edward Bridges, arrived late. When the cabinet did go back on the record, Churchill was defending the proposition that a Britain alone could survive. “We [are] in a different position from France. In the first place we still [have] powers of resistance and attack which [the French] had not. In the second place, they would be likely to be offered decent terms by Germany, which we should not. If France could not defend herself it was better that she shou
ld get out of the war rather than that she should drag us into a settlement which involved intolerable terms. There was no limit to the terms which Germany would impose on us if she had her way.” Halifax, who found Churchill’s analysis unconvincing, said he “was not quite sure it was in Herr Hitler’s interest to insist on outrageous terms.” After all, he knew his own internal weaknesses. Then Halifax brought the discussion back to the Italian approach, which he “could see no harm” in testing. With reservations, Attlee and Chamberlain agreed.

  * * *

  Churchill, who had been left spinning in the air by Halifax’s maneuvering, restated his position more forcefully. “The suggested approach to Signor Mussolini . . . implied that if we were prepared to give Germany back her colonies and make certain concessions in the Mediterranean, it was possible for us to get out of our present difficulties.” That was an illusion. “For example, the terms offered us would certainly prevent us from completing our rearmament.” For the rest of the afternoon cabinet Churchill was like a dog with a bone, returning again and again to the negotiation issue. At one point he warned, “We must take care not to be forced into a weak position in which we went to Signore Mussolini and invited him to go to Herr Hitler and ask him to treat us nicely”; at another, “We must not get entangled in a position like that before we had been involved in any serious fighting.” Still, he remained mindful of his political vulnerability. At the conclusion of the cabinet, he told his colleagues he had no objection “to an approach being made to Signore Mussolini.”

  Greenwood said a few words; then Churchill told the cabinet that nothing should be decided “until we [see] how much of the Army we could re-embark from France.” The request would be ignored; the peace debate would resume the next day and spill over into May 28. However, by the evening of the twenty-sixth, a few things had become clear. Though he had not had a particularly brilliant day, Churchill still held most of the cards. His executive powers gave him some control over the reports his colleagues saw and what they read in the reports. More important, he was the only cabinet member—indeed one of the few men in Britain in May 1940—who had a war strategy that offered a credible hope of survival and, perhaps, eventually victory. A Britain alone stays in the war, fights a great air battle with Germany (which became the Battle of Britain), and, enjoying the home advantage, prevails because it can rescue more of its downed pilots, exploit its lead in radar technology and fuel considerations, and limit the German fighters to twenty-two to twenty-five minutes’ flying time over Britain. The plan would not bring victory, but it would bring what in the late spring and summer of 1940 was almost as valuable to Britain: time. Time to rebuild its shattered military and put its industries on a full wartime footing, and time for the dominions to mobilize their resources. Fighting Germany to a standstill might also persuade the Americans to offer unrestricted military aid and perhaps eventually bring them into the war.