by John Kelly
The air estimates, the next topic on the cabinet’s agenda, produced a more lively discussion. Both Certain Eventuality and British Strategy in the Near Future had cited airpower as the essential element in Britain’s short-term survival, and the Air Ministry’s current estimates, which gave Germany a four-to-one advantage in aircraft, called into question the RAF’s ability to defend the home island. Aware of this, Churchill opened the morning cabinet with a magic trick even Houdini would have admired. He began by citing the aircraft production numbers from the past three years that showed Germany had produced twenty-five thousand military aircraft and Britain fifteen thousand, which meant, at a bare minimum, the Luftwaffe enjoyed only a five-to-three (not a four-to-one) advantage in the air. Next, Churchill cited a new study by the vice chief of the Air Staff, Richard Peirse. Peirse’s figures reduced the Luftwaffe’s advantage in aircraft to two and a half to one. Then, by factoring in the British kill ratio—which Churchill claimed was three to one in Britain’s favor—he made the German advantage disappear. In terms of number of aircraft, he told the cabinet, the “balance was on our side.”
The air minister, Archibald Sinclair, immediately challenged the analysis. The “figure of fifteen thousand . . . referred to aircraft without their full equipment. The German figures of twenty-five thousand . . . covered aircraft complete in every respect.”
Churchill, who had been Sinclair’s superior officer in France during the Great War, held his ground. “From [Peirse’s] table,” he said, “it appeared that the odds against us were only two and a half to one and our airmen were shooting down [German planes at a ratio of] three to one; the balance was on our side.”
Cyril Newall, the chief of the Air Staff, said the prime minister was overstating the kill ratio. It was “very much less favorable for us at night. It was only in the day fighting that we were able to inflict such heavy losses on the enemy.”
Churchill changed the subject to France.
Chamberlain still wanted to talk about airpower. The warnings in Near Future about the British aircraft industry’s vulnerability to attack were alarming, he said. “If the enemy pressed home night attacks, he was likely to achieve such material and moral damage . . . as to bring all work [at the factories] to a standstill. The prospect of . . . the aircraft industry being brought to a complete standstill was extremely dangerous.”
Newall said Chamberlain had highlighted “the kernel of the whole problem”—the danger of an attack on the aircraft industry. “Even on dark nights the Germans would be able to find big areas like Coventry [an important center of aircraft production in the Midlands] and bomb them indiscriminately. If the Germans succeeded in gaining complete air superiority, it might not be necessary for them to invade us at all.”
Chamberlain still wasn’t finished, but now he wanted to talk about the United States, the factor the Chiefs of Staff considered the most important to Britain’s survival. Chamberlain said it was “perhaps not unjustifiable to assume that America would offer its full support.” But “we might not obtain this support in the immediate future.” This hypothesis Churchill did not challenge. On May 15, his eloquent plea to Roosevelt—“I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the force and voice of the United States will count for nothing if they are withheld too long”—had produced an expression of sympathy, a promise to cut some red tape, and little else. Though Britain’s survival was a vital national interest of the United States, in late May Roosevelt was not convinced Britain could survive, which meant American weaponry could end up in German hands.
Churchill made a second request for American aid on the twentieth; this time the request included a threat—though it was so eloquently stated that two readings were required to hear the low growl in the prime minister’s voice. “If members of the present administration were finished and others came in to parlay amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the [British] fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate, no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could. Excuse me, Mr. President, for putting this nightmare bluntly. Evidently, I could not answer for my successors, who in utter despair and helplessness might have to accommodate themselves to the German will.” The warning about the Royal Navy made an impression. The one-ocean US Navy and the second-rate US Army Air Force would find the defense of the Eastern Seaboard very difficult against a combined naval force that included a German-controlled Royal Navy, and the 6 battleships, 19 cruisers, and 116 submarines of Mussolini’s Regia Marina. On May 24, Roosevelt urged Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister, to ask the other dominion prime ministers to join him in making a joint plea to London to transfer the British fleet to North America. Coming from an American president, Roosevelt felt the request could be misinterpreted. Churchill knew about the secret approach to Canada, but he kept his anger in check until a proposal to lease British territories in the Americas to the United States came up at the morning cabinet on the twenty-seventh. Churchill told his colleagues he found such a prospect unbearable. “The United States has given us practically no help in this war, and now that they saw how great the danger was, their attitude was that they wanted to keep everything which would help us for their own defense.”
A discussion of Stanley Bruce and his transgressions brought the cabinet back to common ground. Bruce was the Australian high commissioner, and his “gloomy view” of Britain’s prospects had produced a sensation at a meeting of the dominion high commissioners the previous evening. When the incident came up at the morning cabinet, Chamberlain offered to reassure Bruce and the other high commissioners that “we resolve to fight on,”I even if France surrendered. A. V. Alexander, Churchill’s successor as first lord of the Admiralty, favored a sharper response. He said Bruce should be given a good talking-to, but the dominions secretary, Viscount Caldecote, felt that was unnecessary. Bruce answered to the prime minister of Australia, Robert Menzies, and Menzies had “pledged all of Australia’s resources in the event of France going out of the war.” Caldecote was not as informed about Menzies’s thinking as he imagined. At the end of May, Menzies would suggest approaching Roosevelt about a peace conference, and in July he would propose that Britain lay out her war aims as the starting point for a peace conference.
Churchill said he would “issue a general injunction to ministers to use confident language” to avoid any more incidents like Bruce’s outburst. Then the cabinet broke for lunch, and the debate about war and peace shifted to Rome and Paris.
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By the final week of May 1940, the European diplomatic community was divided about Italy’s entry into the war. One school held that Mussolini’s refusal to meet with high-ranking French and British officials and the gag order he had placed on his ambassadors meant Italy would march. A second school, composed largely of British and French diplomats, disagreed. Members of this group held that, in the case of Mussolini, character was destiny. The Duce’s avarice ensured that he would see the war as an opportunity, and his cunning assured that he would wait until he sensed an intervention would command the very highest price, then jump in and offer his services to the belligerent powers as a mediator and a peacemaker.
The Italian foreign minister, thirty-seven-year-old Count Galeazzo Ciano, belonged to the first school of thought. Ciano “could not fix the exact moment of Italy’s entry into the war,” he told an acquaintance. But he was sure “it would be soon.” Ciano was arguably the second most interesting man in Italy in 1940. He had a physical glamour more often associated with Italian race-car drivers than Italian foreign ministers; he was a war hero, having commanded La Disperata, a renowned Italian bomber squadron, during the Abyssinian campaign. He was married to Mussolini’s daughter Edda and his private life had launched a thousand rumors. What makes Ciano more interesting than the playboy who got daily rubdowns at the Rome Golf Club and could not keep his hands to himself around an attractive wom
an and the gangster who had been implicated in several murders is that he was also an authentic Italian patriot. Ciano believed Mussolini was leading Italy into the abyss, and in time he would turn against his father-in-law; but on May 27, a day all roads led to Rome, that time was still some years off.
One of Ciano’s first visitors that morning was William Phillips, the American ambassador. Phillips announced that he was carrying a “message of the greatest importance from President Roosevelt” and had been instructed to deliver it personally to the Duce. Ciano said that was out of the question. Mussolini was not receiving visitors that day. If Mr. Phillips would give him the gist of the message, he would make notes and pass them on to his chief. The Roosevelt plan Phillips presented that morning sounded remarkably like the plan Halifax had proposed to Bastianini for a reason: it had been inspired by London and Paris. It read:
In the hope of helping your Excellency to prevent [the] extension of [the war] to the Mediterranean theater and perhaps to other zones, I would like to submit to you certain considerations . . .
I am prepared to inform the governments of Great Britain and France of Italian aspirations in the Mediterranean zone, if you desire to make them known to me. . . . If you did wish to use my offer of mediation, it would be understood, should the three powers come to an agreement, that France and Great Britain would be deemed ipso facto, pledged to carry out immediately, at the end of the war, the conditions which had been agreed upon, and to accept the participation of Italy in peace negotiations on the same footing as that of the belligerent countries.
Ciano’s unenthusiastic reaction annoyed Phillips. Didn’t he understand? Phillips was speaking on behalf of the president of the United States! Ciano said he “understood completely, but nothing could now change the course of events. . . . Mussolini wants a war, and even if he were to obtain by peaceful means double what he claims, he would refuse.”
A few hours later, André François Poncet, the French ambassador, visited Ciano. In the wrong light, it would have been easy to mistake François Poncet for a waiter at one of the better Parisian restaurants. But, along with the large nose, the neat mustache, the predilection for bow ties, and the air of perennial attentiveness, the ambassador also possessed a subtle feline intelligence and a talent for collecting information. When he was stationed in Berlin, William Shirer, the CBS correspondent, considered François Poncet the best-informed diplomat in the German capital. Over the past few weeks, the ambassador’s visits with Ciano had acquired the character of a flirtation. Ciano, the suitor, would ask what territorial concessions Italy could expect in return for a pledge of neutrality, and François Poncet, the shy but coy damsel, would reply that he was not at liberty to reveal such information. Usually Ciano would press, though never very hard. Amoral in the big things, he was a gentleman in the small things. That day was a little different. Ciano began as he had begun the Phillips interview, with a warning: Italy would march, and even “the richest gifts” could no longer dissuade Mussolini. Then, not really expecting an answer, he asked François Poncet, as a matter of personal curiosity, “what kind of presents” would France have been prepared to offer? Unexpectedly, this time Poncet exposed a little leg. “Tunisia and perhaps even Algeria.” That night Ciano wrote in his diary: “My conference with Poncet is . . . important . . . as a psychological indication. . . . He made some very precise overtures [but] . . . he is too late.” The Duce “is convinced that things are now coming to a head, and he wants to create enough claims to be entitled to his share of the spoils.”
At about the time that François Poncet was telling Ciano “Tunisia and perhaps even Algeria,” in Paris, Reynaud was telling Spears about his conversation with Halifax the day before: he said the foreign secretary had told him if Italy agreed to “collaborate in establishing a peace that preserved the independence of Great Britain and France” he, Halifax, would tell Mussolini that “the Allies would . . . discuss Italian claims in the Mediterranean, including those connected with the access to that sea.”
Spears was shocked by Halifax’s indiscretion but kept his surprise to himself. “The only way to keep the Italians out” of the war, he told Reynaud, “is to make it clear to them that if they do come in, they will be hit so hard that they will be only too glad to scuttle out again. To bribe them at this stage will only encourage them, and I cannot see the British people giving up Gibraltar and Suez.”
Reynaud said the Panzers could take Paris whenever they wanted, but he said it in a way that sounded more like a pout than a warning.
Spears stood up and put his hands on Reynaud’s shoulders. “These are tales for frightened children. The . . . lines of advance [into Paris] are comparatively narrow. They could be mined wholesale.” Reynaud did not look reassured.
Spears left the meeting depressed. How could little Reynaud, with his toy soldier courage, stand up to Pétain: spectral, emotionally detached, and prepared to use his immense prestige to bring about an armistice; to Weygand, obsessed by the desire to emulate the Roman Senate and putting it about that Dunkirk was an “English defection”; to the Comtesse de Portes, who shared his bed, poisoned his mind, and “hated the English”; and to the comtesse’s protégé Paul Baudouin, Reynaud’s chef de cabinet, who was rumored to be working closely with “financial groups dead set against the war”? The premier possessed many virtues, Spears knew—intelligence, industry, patriotism—but lacked the strength of character and visceral courage of a Clemenceau or a Churchill.
* * *
Toward the end of May, Clare Boothe was sitting in Le Bourget Aerodrome, awaiting a flight to London, when a “little Frenchman” in a homburg and spats took the seat next to her. When they got to talking, Boothe discovered that her companion was a diplomat and a veteran of Verdun, the bloodiest battle of the Great War. For 299 days in 1916—through winter snow, spring mud, and summer heat—300,000 German artillery shells had daily poured into Verdun. When the shelling stopped on the 300th day, between 340,000 and 378,000 French soldiers were dead, and hundreds of thousands more were maimed. Boothe, who had read about Verdun as a schoolgirl, asked the diplomat how he had endured such carnage. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “The first day [I] was in the trenches, the barrage was so frightful it made the heavens tremble, and the next dawn it began again and the following day it was the same. . . . The third night, of my regiment, thirty men were left, and I said to myself, the battle is lost and I will die. . . . Then as the fourth dreadful dawn began to break, [I] told myself, ‘Ah, but tomorrow, not even tomorrow can I live forever. . . . So although it was not easy, [I] decided when the sun lit the summer horizon to rise from the trench, [and] turn my rifle to the sound of the guns, saying, ‘Good morning, death.’ ”
On the morning of May 27, 1940, Patrick Turnbull entertained a similar thought as he sat under a poplar tree outside Armentières, counting the twin-engine Dorniers and the Heinkel bombers forming up on the horizon. Turnbull counted 120 planes, then stopped. This morning, for the first time since the start of the German offensive, he was feeling something like relief. His transportation unit had been ordered to Dunkirk for early evacuation. As he was contemplating this happy thought, the driver in the lorry next to his shouted, “Who are the poor sods who are going to cop it this time?” and pointed to the sky. Turnbull looked up; the Dorniers and Heinkels had turned south and were headed toward him. Over Armentières, the planes opened their bomb bay doors, and columns of five-hundred-pound bombs whistled downward through the morning sky. Turnbull waited for Armentières to disappear in a cloud of black smoke; instead, jets of flames shot up from the town. The Germans were using incendiaries today. Death by explosives at least had the virtue of quickness; death by incendiaries did not. You burned and burned before you died. This thought brought to mind an ancestor of Turnbull’s, one of the St. Giles martyrs, who had been burned at the stake. Turnbull took out his map and searched for an alternative road to the beaches. There were none. The only road to Dunkirk led through Armentières.
Five minutes later, Turnbull was “crashing down the main street [of the town] at sixty or seventy miles an hour.” The heat from the burning buildings on either side of the street was so intense, the steering wheel was “burning in his hands,” his face felt as if it had “been shoved in an overheated oven,” and “stinging globules of plastic were dripping onto his trousers” from a melting plastic ornament on the dashboard. Turnbull was waiting for the petrol tank to explode and kill him or the flames from the buildings to engulf the lorry’s cabin, when the street took a sharp turn and the holocaust abruptly gave way to “the blessed sight of green fields.” Turnbull pulled over onto the grass and collapsed.
Earlier that morning, representatives of the French and British High Commands had met in Cassel, a town nineteen miles north of Armentières and one of the last outposts of seminormalcy along the Franco-Belgian border on May 27. Except for the columns of men and matériel passing outside the window, the occasional unburied body, and the distant sound of artillery fire from the town of Hazebrouck, where the Germans were attempting to break into the southern flank of the Allied corridor, the war was a relatively discreet presence in Cassel that morning. When the meeting convened at a local school, there was some talk of how to respond in the event a Belgian surrender suddenly left the northern side of the corridor undefended, but Dunkirk dominated the discussion.
In his memoirs, Churchill claims that Reynaud was told about the British evacuation during his visit to London on May 26. If so, Reynaud did not inform his generals, or, if he did, the information got garbled in transmission. Weygand’s orders only authorized a French withdrawal to the port, not an evacuation. On the morning of the twenty-seventh, the French troops moving up to the corridor were under the impression that they would make a final stand in Dunkirk with their backs to the sea. Some historians have suggested that the British were deliberately vague on the “touchy subject” of evacuation, leaving the French to infer what was happening from events. Whatever the reason, on May 30 Gort’s chief of staff, General Pownall, who, like his superior, was inclined to view perfidy as a uniquely French affliction, noted in his diary, “The French and British government were none too well d’accord over the business [of evacuation].”
