by John Kelly
Halifax had a better debate than Churchill on the twenty-sixth, but as the days passed, the weaknesses in his argument would become apparent. Though peace was a more attractive commodity than war, he was advancing a controversial position—a negotiated settlement—against an unusually forceful prime minister with his own strategy, and, in the sudden rush of tumultuous events, Halifax had not had time to develop a simple, cogent argument that distinguished clearly between what he was saying—Britain should test the possibility of a compromise peace—from what he was not saying—Britain should surrender. When Churchill spoke of fighting on alone, the mantle of history—Agincourt, Waterloo, Trafalgar, the Armada—sang through his sentences. When Halifax spoke of achieving a new “European arrangement,” he sounded like a nervous solicitor reading from a half-thought-out brief. Still, the foreign secretary was not without advantages. He was a popular figure in the Conservative Party, and his resignation would damage the prime minister, and if the other “wise old elephant” in the cabinet, Chamberlain, resigned in sympathy, the Churchill government could fall—and Churchill was aware of this.
Of the three other members of the war cabinet, Greenwood and Attlee leaned toward the Churchill position; Chamberlain, at times, toward Halifax’s; but during the debates all three men would occasionally contradict themselves, as would Churchill, who, at various points, could be heard saying if “we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies, he would jump at it.” A number of historians have pointed to such remarks as proof that Churchill was prepared to accept a negotiated settlement, and he may have been, though it is difficult to conceive of any German terms he would have found acceptable and, if he did accept, would honor. By temperament, Churchill was a maximalist and a romantic. “The Gatling gun is jammed and the colonel is dead” was not a schoolboy poem to him, it was a life plan. However, in late May 1940, a war policy based on “Vitaï Lampada” would have been very hard to sell to a frightened, confused British public. The most Churchill could hope to win in the debates with Halifax was a sanction for his plan—Britain stays in the war to fight its battle. He did not state his view that baldly, but his frequent assertions that Britain’s position could change in the next two or three months were code for the big battle. What else could change Britain’s position so quickly and so dramatically? For the most part, Churchill’s twists, turns, and contradictions can be dismissed as the verbal equivalent of rope-a-dope by a vulnerable politician.
Reynaud, the other major figure in the events of May 26, returned to Paris infused with a convert’s zeal. “The only one who truly understands is Halifax,” he told a colleague. “[Halifax] is clearly worried about the future and realizes some European solution must be reached. Churchill is always hectoring and Chamberlain undecided.” Unlike most of the other parties to the peace debate, Mussolini, the ghost at the table on May 26, exhibited the virtue of consistency. On May 17 he had rudely rebuffed a moving and elegant appeal for Anglo-Italian comity by Churchill, and on May 26, fearful Germany would claim all the spoils, he was even more eager to bring Italy into the war. That afternoon, as the Italian approach was debated in London, in Rome Count Ciano, Mussolini’s foreign minister, was noting in his diary that “the Duce . . . plans to write a letter to Hitler announcing our intervention for the latter part of June.” And the following day, May 27, Mussolini would rebuff yet another peace appeal from President Roosevelt. All of this was or would soon be known to the Allies, as would the Duce’s muzzling of the Italian ambassadors in Washington, Paris, and London, who were under orders not to engage in substantial negotiations with British and French officials, which is why one of the most interesting things about the debates over the Italian approach is what they said about the level of fear and desperation in Allied capitals.
* * *
The British public, unaware of the great issues being debated in their name, and braced by the Prayer Day observances, achieved a steadiness of mood on the twenty-sixth that had eluded them the previous two days. From Manchester came accounts of “an excellent spirit in the factories”; from London, of “more cheerfulness” on the streets; and from Oxford, of more “optimism.” However, the analysts at Mass Observation were loath to credit the Almighty for the improvement. The twenty-sixth fell on a Sunday, and even in wartime Sunday was a slow news day, which meant less exposure to disturbing headlines. The analysts also gave the government’s new censorship program some of the credit for the improvement in morale, though they were of two minds about the program itself. Unquestionably, softening and/or holding back bad news for a few days did help stabilize public opinion, but was it a devil’s bargain? A fair amount of evidence suggested that censorship could intensify the impact of bad news when it was finally released. This insight was particularly relevant on the evening of May 26. Earlier in the day, Hitler had lifted his Panzer halt order, ensuring that another large packet of dreadful news would shortly be making its way across the Channel.
* * *
In Calais, which guarded the southern flank of the Allied corridor, the German assault began in a light rain at about 9:00 a.m. on the twenty-sixth, two days after Brigadier Nicolson learned that the British garrison would not be evacuated. News of the decision arrived in a most unlikely manner. On the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, Lieutenant Hugo Ironside was in the Citadel, a British stronghold in Calais, when the phone rang. When Ironside picked up the receiver, there was a familiar voice on the other end of the line. He was speaking to General Edmund Ironside, chief of the Imperial General Staff and a family relation. The elder Ironside said that to relieve the German pressure on the Dunkirk perimeter, the British garrison was being ordered to mount a last-man-last-round stand in Calais. As he wrote down the message, Lieutenant Ironside must have had mixed feelings about his esteemed relative: he was in the army rather than the air force because General Ironside had told him his chances of survival would be better as a soldier.
On the evening of the twenty-fifth, a small armada of British yachts and trawlers had appeared off Calais, briefly rekindling hopes of an evacuation. But the ships were freelancing and only a few dared the harbor to evacuate troops. The only vessel with official business in Calais that evening carried a message for Nicolson: “Hold out at all costs.” At eight the next morning, London received a desperate situation report from Nicolson. “Quays and harbor under MG [machine gun] fire. . . . Troops dead beat, no tanks left . . . reinforcements would have to be on a considerable scale . . . [and] probably a forlorn hope.” An hour later, the sound of tank engines could be heard toward the east; then a wall of artillery fire descended on the Old Town (the ancient part of Calais). After the barrage ended, Airey Neave, a British captain wounded earlier in the day, heard the crunching sound of hundreds of feet running over a field of rubble. Then other sounds drifted down to the cellar where Neave was hiding: the crackle of gunfire; the “hoarse shouts of German under officers” entering the first floor of Neave’s building; the heavy thud of boots rushing down the cellar stairs; and, finally, “field gray figures waving revolvers” in his face. “It was a sad ending,” Neave wrote. At about three in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, Anthony Eden sent a message to the Citadel: “Am filled with admiration for your magnificent fight”; but by the time the cable arrived, the “every man for himself” order had been given and no one was in the Citadel to read the message. An hour later, Brigadier Nicolson surrendered. Shortly thereafter, all organized British resistance in the town ended.
At six that evening, the Admiralty signaled Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay, the flag officer, at the Dover station: “Operation Dynamo is to commence.” Dynamo was the code name for the seaborne evacuation of the BEF, and the naval high command was not optimistic about its prospects. On the open beaches and shallow waters around Dunkirk, men and ships would be vulnerable to air attack, and now that Calais had fallen, the sea route between Dunkirk and Dover (the latter, the landing site for evacuated troops) would be within range of German ar
tillery. Best estimates were that forty-five thousand men, or about a fifth of the BEF’s quarter-million-man force, could be rescued before German shelling and bombing made the beaches unapproachable. To Patrick Turnbull, a British transportation officer, even that estimate sounded optimistic. Turnbull was not a religious man, but the scene framed in the windshield of his truck as he drove into Dunkirk on the evening of his evacuation—silos of heavy black smoke billowing up into a blood-red sky—had such an Old Testament power that for a moment Turnbull imagined he was viewing “a giant funeral pyre on which was being consumed the corpses of French and British military might.”
Later that night, after the news from Calais had come through, Churchill asked John Martin, one of his secretaries, to look up a passage in George Borrow’s prayer for England at Gibraltar. The passage read: “Fear not the result, for either shall thy end be majestic and an enviable one or God shall perpetuate thy reign upon the waters.”
CHAPTER TEN
“GOOD MORNING, DEATH”
I said, “Any ideas how we shall win?”
“Oh, the usual formula,” said Carter. “Mastery of the air with American help. Bomb their factories to blazes. Stir up trouble in the occupied countries, and there you are.”
“Time factor for the process?” I said.
“Oh, God knows,” said Carter with a grin. “We leave that bit out.”
I said, “Oh, well, we usually do win things.”
“Yes,” said Carter. “Between us I think that’s really the best argument at the moment.”
Visiting the pediatric ward of a London hospital on the morning after the Prayer Day, a visitor found the silence deafening. “The children had no heart for the rocking horse [and] the mothers talked . . . in low voices.” By the final week of May, the war had overwhelmed every aspect of British life. It was the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, the song in every music hall, the subject of every conversation, the first thought every morning, the last thought every night. It was the postman on his bike with a satchel of death notices and the soldier in the Evening Express cartoon standing on Dover’s cliffs proclaiming “Very Well Alone.” The war was everywhere now and all-encompassing; it disrupted the settled rhythms of thought and feeling and insinuated itself into the most intimate precincts of private life, making conversations previously heard only in the films of Ronald Colman and Greta Garbo a part of daily life. “Every time we meet now,” Harold Nicolson told his wife, “it must be in both our minds that we may never meet again.”
The physical geography of the war was as extensive as its emotional geography. It encompassed the fishing villages of coastal England, where government men walked the wharves and piers, inquiring about the local supply of small boats, and Claridge’s and the Ritz, where men “unshaven and still covered with [the] mud” of France lunched on partridge and champagne. At the beginning of June, a major just back from France told Clare Boothe (who had just arrived in London herself): “In the last war I used to sleep at the Ritz in Paris every night and barge out to the front right after breakfast. Queer . . . I should now be coming back from the front to Claridge’s.” The geographical reach of the war also extended to the Home Office, where plans were made to evacuate a hundred thousand British children to the United States and the dominions. “It is a portent of things to come,” Vera Brittain said upon hearing of the plan. “The Government would not organize so large a scheme unless it was convinced that horror and dislocation would come to this country with the downfall of Europe.” The war’s geographic domain also intruded into the private lives of Winston and Clementine Churchill. On the evening of May 30, the Churchills were summoned from the living quarters at Admiralty House (the Chamberlains had not yet vacated Downing Street) to the reception area, where the prime minister’s nephew, Johnny Churchill, awaited them “in full battle kit” and “soaking wet.”
“Johnny, I see you have come straight from battle.”
The younger Churchill told his uncle he had been “sent . . . to say that [there was a] most urgent need for small boats to get the troops off the beaches and out to the bigger ships.”
The prime minister examined his nephew’s battle kit. “Have you come straight from the sea?”
“Yes,” Johnny said, “and I will be pleased to go back in again in a fast motor boat to give everyone encouragement.”
On the morning of May 27, all of the war’s various emotional and geographic matrices intersected at the point Johnny Churchill would return to later in the day, the Dunkirk corridor.
In the closing days of May, the German advance had become so rapid that the image of the corridor on Allied situation maps changed almost daily. On the twenty-seventh, it suggested a vise crushing a metal pipe. The southern side of the corridor was under attack at more than half a dozen points, and on the northern side at at least four. Mindful that the decisive air battle would be fought over Britain, not Dunkirk, on May 27, the RAF put only sixteen fighter squadrons over the beaches, insufficient to blunt the ferocious attacks of the Germans, who won the day in the air and on the ground. Only 7,700 men were evacuated on the twenty-seventh, and almost all of them arrived in Dover (the main reception area for evacuees) complaining about the RAF. But at least they were home. The root, branch, and stem of the Allied army was still inching its way through the treeless, marshy flatlands of Flanders toward the beaches, machine-gunned from the air, shelled from the ground, and stumbling across trench lines dug sometime between the First Battle of Ypres and the Fourth. Of this army, one man wrote, “It looked like a lava of mud crawling slowly towards the sea from a far off eruption”:
Every road was packed with Lorries, mobile search lights, Brengun carriers, fifteen hundred weights. Ambulances, broken down Lorries, anything on wheels. . . . Everywhere . . . fluttered from the little brick-house villages through which [the soldiers] crawled. . . . Tokens of surrender—sheets, towels, table cloths, even handkerchiefs. It would be five long years before some of [the soldiers] would see this kind of abject, total surrender—that would be Germany in 1945. Most of the houses were barricaded behind their wooden shutters, though the anxious soldiers could sense the tense . . . life behind those shutters. Here and there, little groups of women stood, arms crossed over their aproned bosoms, watching the defeated army go by without any feeling, as if it were no concern of theirs; as if these beaten young men in khaki might be aliens from some other and remote world.
Oppressed by the pervasive atmosphere of the war the previous day, while the rest of Britain knelt in prayer, John Colville, the young Downing Street aide, slipped away to Oxford with a lady friend. Colville’s diary entry for May 26 reads like a lyric from “These Foolish Things Remind Me of You.” Lunch on a river bench, “the laughter of the children along the tow path,” Christchurch Meadows under “the setting sun. I have never felt greater serenity or contentment.” But the next morning, Monday, May 27, when Colville returned to Downing Street, the war was standing at the door waiting for him. There were rumors of an imminent Belgian surrender and of cabinet discussions about a negotiated settlement. “We have reached all but the last ditch,” Colville thought. “A timely miracle would be acceptable.” But the only miracle May 27 had to dispense was another day of “king’s weather.”
In the unusually long, contentious cabinet meetings of the twenty-seventh, the afternoon session would be devoted to a second debate about a compromise peace; the morning session to a related issue, the possibility of a Belgian surrender. Just before dawn on the twenty-seventh, the counselor at the Belgium embassy in London informed the Foreign Office that King Leopold was contemplating a separate peace with Germany. The counselor said the Belgian Army was ruined, which was true, and left the Foreign Office to sort out how that would affect Britain’s military position. Spears’s little fable about drowning rats clawing each other to death as they tried to escape was beginning to acquire the character of a prophecy. Two days earlier, the British had considered sacrificing the Belgian Army to
save the BEF. Now King Leopold was proposing to sacrifice British and French troops—a Belgian surrender would leave portions of the Allied corridor undefended—to save his army. Churchill asked Admiral Keyes, his personal representative in Brussels, to impress upon the king the “disastrous consequences” of a capitulation on the Allies and on Belgium; Keyes said he would try but was not optimistic; the king’s mind seemed made up. Oddly, given Belgian strategic importance, when the cabinet convened at 11:00 a.m., none of the ministers pressed for details about Leopold’s decision; even more oddly, Sir John Dill, who had just replaced Ironside as chief of the Imperial Staff, reported that the Calais garrison, which had surrendered sixteen hours earlier, was still “holding out with great gallantry.”
