Never Surrender

by John Kelly

Halifax disagreed. “We must not ignore the fact that we might get better terms before France went out of the war and our aircraft factories were bombed, than we might get in three months’ time.” Halifax’s reference to “three months”—Churchill’s time frame for bringing about Britain’s deliverance—was probably not accidental.

  If it was a sly dig, however, Churchill either missed it or chose to ignore it; he continued to attack the Italian approach. Mussolini “would take his whack out at us,” he said, and it was naive to think that “Herr Hitler would be so foolish as to let us continue our rearmament.” Then he reiterated an argument he had made several times since the start of the debate. If Britain continued the fight and was ultimately defeated, the terms offered would be no worse than the terms on offer now. He considered this point so important that he came back to it again a few sentences later. “A time might come when we felt we had to put an end to the struggle, but the terms would be no more mortal than those offered to us now.”

  Halifax said he still did not understand what was so wrong about testing the possibilities of a negotiation.

  Churchill said he did. The real aim of Reynaud’s new plan was to get us to the conference table and that, once we got there, “we should find that the terms offered [us] touched on our independence and integrity.” Then he made a subtle psychological observation. “When, at this point, we got up to leave . . . we should find that all the forces of resolution which were now at our disposal would have vanished.” Churchill’s next point was a good debating tactic but historically questionable. He said, “Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.”

  Chamberlain also disliked the French plan, but fearing a flat no would weaken French resolve, he proposed that the cabinet fashion a reply that left the door open a little. “We should say to the French, ‘In our view, mediation at this stage, in the presence of a great disaster and at a time when many people think we have no more resources left, could only have the most unfortunate results.’ . . . We concluded, therefore, that without prejudice to future, the present was not the time at which advances should be made to Signore Mussolini.”

  Toward the end of the debate, there was a sharp exchange between Halifax, who said that Reynaud also wanted Britain and France to make a joint appeal to the United States, and Greenwood, who said that Reynaud was too much inclined to hawk around appeals. A little later when Greenwood said that he did not feel this was the time for ultimate capitulation, Halifax took the statement as a personal attack. “Nothing in his suggestion [to test out the French plan] could even remotely be described as ultimate capitulation,” he said.

  It was nearly five fifteen now. Outside, the late-afternoon shadows were slipping across the back of the barrage balloons in Hyde Park, and the streets were filling with people returning from work. It was almost time to adjourn. But Clement Attlee, who had been silent for the past hour, wanted to say a final word about “public opinion.” Attlee’s statement was basically a restatement of a point Churchill had made several times. Public morale, already fragile, would shatter if word leaked out that the government was negotiating with Mussolini or Hitler. That was a real possibility, of course, but in an early June analysis of morale trends, Mass Observation found that the Belgian surrender and the other setbacks of May had, by forcing people to face the truth, created the foundation of a healthier, more resilient morale. “Roughly speaking,” the MO report noted, “people are calm but exceedingly anxious. The events of the last month, while they have upset and in one sense lowered morale, have actually improved morale in the strictest sense of the word. For whereas before people were confident of victory, without a glimmering of what the struggle for victory might mean, now they realize to a considerable extent what they are up against. They don’t realize it fully yet, especially the majority who left school when they were fourteen and have never crossed the Channel . . . but at least the period of wishful thinking is over.” The statistical index MO used to track morale provided support for this view. In the index, 1.00 was the mean; scores above it indicated an increase in public optimism; scores below it, an increase in public pessimism. On May 10, the day the German offensive began, the index score was 0.82; on May 28 it was 2.17.

  After Attlee finished, the cabinet briefly returned to Reynaud’s proposal to make a joint appeal to Roosevelt, which no one liked. Then the other ministers went off to dinner, while Churchill prepared for the arrival of twenty-five members of the outer cabinet, whom he had promised to brief on the emergency in France. The meeting, which Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s most distinguished biographer, called among “the most extraordinary scenes of the war,” and John Charmley, another respected Churchill biographer, called “the most important meeting of 1940,” was Churchill’s surprise. And, whatever else the surprise was—a coup or just a briefing—it was Churchill unfettered and unbuttoned. The subjects he touched on included Dunkirk; Hitler; the fall of Paris; the invasion threat; and Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. But they were woven into a narrative of valor and daring, which, in the mind of any halfway patriotic Englishman, would evoke images of national glory: Wellington at Waterloo, Chinese Gordon at Khartoum, Scott in the Antarctic, Drake sailing out to meet the Armada, the Light Brigade in the Valley of Death, and innumerable desperate last stands in the Punjab and the Khyber Pass of the “Gatling gun’s . . . jammed and the colonel is dead” variety.

  Churchill’s guests loved every word of it.

  “He was quite magnificent,” wrote Hugh Dalton, the minister of economic warfare and a senior Labour politician. “The man, and the only man we have, for this hour.” Dalton’s notes of the speech indicate that in between the rhetorical flourishes, Churchill gave a full, frank, and completely calm account of events in France. Dalton has him saying of the evacuation that “it was necessary to fight our way through to the Channel Ports and get away all we could. How many we could get away we could not tell. We should certainly be able to get away 50,000. If we could get away 100,000 that would be a wonderful performance. Only Dunkirk was left to us. Calais had been defended by a British force, which had refused to surrender, and it was said there were no survivors.

  “We must now expect the sudden turning of the war against this island,” Churchill told his guests. “And we must not be taken by surprise, by any events. Attempts to invade this island would no doubt be made, but they would be beset by immense difficulty. We should mine all around our coast; our Navy was extremely strong; our air defenses were much more easily organized from this island than across the Channel; our supplies of food and oil were ample; we had good troops in this island, and others were on the way by sea, both British Army units coming from remote garrisons and excellent dominion troops, and, as to aircraft, we were now making more than good our current losses and the Germans were not.

  “I have thought carefully in these last few days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering negotiations with That Man,” Churchill said. “But it [is] idle to think that, if we tried peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet—that would be called disarmament—our naval bases and much else. We should become a slave state, though, a British Government, which would be Hitler’s puppet, would be set up—under Mosley or some such person. And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other hand we had immense reserves and advantages.

  “I am convinced,” he concluded, “that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

  Churchill said many contradictory things in 1940, but when he spoke like this—and he spoke like this often that summer—he was speaking from convictions so deeply rooted in his being, they almost possessed a physical essence; combined with his manipulation of people and reports, it is difficult to imagine that he
was capable of conceiving of any course other than victory, or a reasonable facsimile of it. He would fight on until the end, or until Parliament and the British people removed him from office.

  When the war cabinet reconvened at seven, Churchill announced that, in the interim, he had briefed the members of the outer cabinet on the French emergency, and they had “expressed satisfaction when he told them there was no chance of our giving up.” Indeed, said Churchill, he could “not remember having ever before heard a gathering of persons occupying high places in political life express themselves so emphatically.” Toward the end of the evening cabinet Halifax brought up the Anglo-French appeal to the United States again. Should it be pursued? No, Churchill said. “At the present time [it] would be altogether premature. If we made a bold stand against Germany, [it] would command [American] admiration and respect, but a groveling appeal, if made now, would have the worst possible effect.” Churchill also won the argument on the French plan Reynaud had presented to Spears. The cabinet agreed to reject it.

  * * *

  Not long after Germany’s May 29 announcement that the British and French armies in northern France had become trapped in two pockets, a new joke circulated through Berlin. People would tell one another, “Now we have the Allies in both pockets”—and collapse in laughter. The smaller of the pockets was in the Lille region and held the remnants of the three French divisions still defending the town. The larger pocket, which ran roughly in a semicircle around the port of Dunkirk, held the BEF and a good portion of the French army sent north to defend the Dyle line. In newspaper maps, the pocket, which extended twenty-five miles inland from Dunkirk, resembled a thrusting sword and signified what was left of the Allied corridor, which was not much. On the twenty-ninth the general consensus among the troops in the corridor was that if they did not reach the beaches in the next thirty-six hours, they would never reach them.

  In London that morning, Churchill issued a general injunction on morale. “In these dark days, the Prime Minister would be grateful if all his colleagues in Government, as well as officials as important, would maintain high morale in their circles, not minimizing the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and flexible resolve to continue the war until we have broken the will of the enemy.”

  The injunction was well timed. In the final week of May, an end-of-days mood was settling upon certain members of the British political and military elite. On the twenty-ninth, another day of sun and intermittent rain, General Ironside wrote an elegy for the BEF and for Gort in his diary. “I shan’t see him again. A gallant man. Little we thought a couple of weeks ago that this would be the end of the BEF.” Henry Channon also felt the apocalypse approaching. “I wonder as I gaze out on the gray and green Horse Guards Parade, with the blue sky, the huge silver balloons like bowing elephants, the barbed wire and the soldiers about, is this really the end of England? Are we witnessing, as for so long I have feared, the decay and perhaps extinction, of this great island people?” Pessimism had also infected the Imperial General Staff. In a series of June reports, the CIGS, Sir John Dill, would question whether the British Home Army had the training and the steadiness to defeat a German invasion force, and at various points in June both Dill and Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, would raise doubts about the “ability of the Navy to protect us,” and about the effectiveness of the RAF, which had been “greatly weakened by operations in France.” “The scene continues to darken day by day,” Chamberlain wrote in his diary. In public, Churchill wore his resolve like a suit of armor, but, away from the public eye, he was occasionally visited by fears that Britain’s long island story had reached the final chapter. In a May 27 cable to the dominion prime ministers, he said that while Britain had every intention of remaining in the war, “this view is of course without prejudice to considerations that might hereafter be put forward for the cessation of hostilities and subject to developments in the military situation, which is now liable to change from hour to hour.”

  Mass Observation’s morale report for May 29 provided considerable evidence for the contention that ignorance is bliss. “On the whole, morale was good today,” MO noted, but the positive appraisal owed a great deal to the sizable number of people who had been confused by press accounts of the Belgian surrender and thought the Belgian government’s renunciation of the king meant that the Belgian Army was still fighting, and to people who had left school at fourteen and had never been abroad. Together, the two groups offset the low morale scores of a third group, “the better off and the better educated, the students of strategy and the people who have crossed the Channel [and] see the position more clearly, or too clearly and, indeed, often exaggerate in their mental anticipation.”

  Clare Boothe, who had spent most of May in Paris, had a different view of British morale. “The average Englishman, while worried, was not like the average Frenchman, despairing. . . . The English were stiffening themselves for the coming struggle [but] they were still in no wise in the war the way the French people were.” Leading members of London’s diplomatic community, including Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador; the Duke of Alba, the Spanish ambassador; and Björn Prytz, the Swedish ambassador, were also impressed by the steadiness of the British public. In a May 31 dispatch, another diplomatic admirer, Giuseppe Bastianini, reported to Rome that British morale was “up.” Margery Allingham’s theory about morale may explain the steadiness that foreigners found so admirable. In Margery’s view, eyes straight ahead and a stiff upper lip were not totems of resolve but coping mechanisms that helped people keep their fears of a “smash-up” under control. The fear was never entirely hidden, though, not from people who knew how to look for it. Walking through a half-empty London on the afternoon of May 30, Edward R. Murrow saw signs of it in the grave faces and in the almost trance-like state of the “people walking slowly along the streets, reading their newspapers”; and in the deserted tearooms and half-empty shops in Bond Street. The fear was also apparent in the war rumors that George Orwell was collecting. On May 29 his diary contained almost half a dozen new ones, including that the Germans would inaugurate an air campaign against Britain, with a massive bomber strike on London on May 31, two days hence. “That Hitler’s plan for invading England [included the] use of thousands of speed boats which can ride over the mine fields. That there was a terrible shortage of rifles”—this rumor was true. “[And] that the morale of the ordinary German soldier was pitiably low.” (This rumor was untrue.)

  Fear of the “smash-up” was also apparent in the offices of the Canadian High Commission, which, as the emergency in France deepened, had steadily gained favor with wealthy Britons (Canada did not yet have embassies of its own), who had hitherto regarded the office as the dull outpost of a dull colonial race. Day after day, “a stream of people press in, seeking travel visas for themselves or their children,” wrote Charles Ritchie, a young Canadian diplomat. A certain “Lady B., looking radiant, comes in to ask if I would arrange for her son’s prep school to be affiliated with a boys’ boarding school in Canada and to migrate [her son’s schoolmates] ‘en masse’ to Canada. The Marchioness of C., in the uniform of the Woman’s Naval Auxiliary Unit, wants to get three children out to Canada at once. . . . The Austrian Rothschilds”—escaped from a concentration camp—“trying to pass their medical exams to go to Canada, ask if I would arrange a financial guarantee for them.”

  In early June, Ritchie, whose experience of war was limited to the German POWs he had seen on a boyhood visit to Calais in 1920, drove down to Dover. The evacuation was in full swing now, and the refuse trail on the London-Dover line, which had reached only up to Ashford on May 28, now encroached on the London suburbs. Dover’s geography—twenty miles from France—gave the town an ancient knowledge of war. Dover Castle, begun as a Roman lookout post, had been built into a proper fortification by Henry II. In the nineteenth century the town acquired two new fortifications, Dover Redoubt and Dover Turret. The peculiarities of the current war had created two Dovers. One
was centered around Castle Street, where rows of Union Jacks fluttered above gaily decorated tables manned by smiling young women who feigned shock at the cheeky banter of the soldiers and sailors who stopped for a doughnut, a crumpet, and something to drink. The other Dover was where the war was. The soldiers disembarking from the battered destroyers and Channel ferries had the haunted look of men who had been to places where, even in the deepest watches of the night, death had slept with one eye open. When Ritchie arrived that morning, a British destroyer, “its stern blown clear off by a bomb, was limping home with flags still flying.”

  On the other side of the harbor, a group of French sailors were having an animated debate about the physical attributes of the naked woman in the photo they were passing around. Presently, a large navy tug arrived with a hundred or so German POWs. Ritchie was surprised by their appearance. The Great War POWs in Calais had had shaven heads. “These men . . . had long hair which fell over their eyes as they stumbled along the gangplank. Some were aviators and . . . had an air of arrogance.” The other ranks, the privates and corporals, who ran down the gangplanks and huddled together like sheep on the pier, were hard to connect with the stories Ritchie had heard about German ferocity. Shorn of their weapons and coal scuttle helmets, the soldiers looked like “amputees [who] had been deprived of some vital limb or . . . castrated.” The German wounded were the last to be unloaded. They were swung down from the tug’s decks by a crane and then laid out on stretchers along the pier. Many were very young and already had the “waxen immobility” of the dead. Out beyond the harbor, a mist was forming over the smooth Channel sea, and from the direction of the Dover cliffs, sparkling under the late-spring sun, the cawing of gulls could be heard. From his vantage point on the pier, Ritchie could see “a group of old ladies coming out of church after eleven o’clock services.” Several of the women stopped to chat near a field of buttercups where a gaggle of “little boys were rolling about wresting.” Ritchie noticed that all the boys were wearing “a little cardboard gas mask case.”