by Max Hastings
Lees-Milne and like-minded critics missed an important aspect of Churchill’s attitude to conflict in general, and to the Second World War in particular. He thrilled to the cannon’s roar, and rejoiced in its proximity to himself. Yet never for a moment did he lose his sense of dismay about the death and destruction that war visited upon the innocent. ‘Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime,’ he wrote as a correspondent in South Africa in January 1900. ‘If modern men of light and leading saw your face closer simple folk would see it hardly ever.’ Hitler was indifferent to the sufferings his policies imposed upon mankind. Churchill never flinched from the necessity to pay in blood for the defeat of Nazi tyranny. But his sole purpose was to enable the guns to be silenced, the peoples of the world restored to their peaceful lives.
Appetite for the fray was among Churchill’s most convincing credentials for national leadership in May 1940. Neville Chamberlain had many weaknesses as prime minister, but foremost among them was a revulsion from the conflict to which his country was committed, shared by many members of his government. One of them, Rob Bernays, said: ‘I wish I were twenty. I cannot bear this responsibility.’ A nation which found itself committed to a life-and-death struggle against one of the most ruthless tyrannies in history was surely wise to entrust its leadership to a man eager to embrace the role, rather than one who shrank from it. This book discusses Churchill’s follies and misjudgements, which were many and various. But these are as pimples upon the mountain of his achievement. It is sometimes said that the British and American peoples are still today, in the twenty-first century, indecently obsessed with the Second World War. The reason is not far to seek. We know that here was something which our parents and grandparents did well, in a noble cause that will forever be identified with the person of Winston Churchill, warlord extraordinary.
Max Hastings
Chilton Foliat, Berkshire
May 2009
ONE
The Battle of France
For seven months after the Second World War began in September 1939, many British people deluded themselves that it might gutter out before there was a bloodbath in the West. On 5 April 1940, while the armed but passive confrontation which had persisted since the fall of Poland still prevailed on the Franco-German border, prime minister Neville Chamberlain told a Conservative Party meeting: ‘Hitler has missed the bus.’ Less than five weeks later, however, on 7 May, he addressed the House of Commons to explain the disastrous outcome of Britain’s campaign to frustrate the German occupation of Norway. Beginning with a tribute to British troops who had ‘carried out their task with magnificent gallantry’, in halting tones he continued:
I hope that we shall not exaggerate the extent or the importance of the check we have received. The withdrawal from southern Norway is not comparable to the withdrawal from Gallipoli…There were no large forces involved. Not much more than a single division…Still, I am quite aware…that some discouragement has been caused to our friends, and that our enemies are crowing…I want to ask hon. Members not to form any hasty opinions on the result of the Norwegian campaign so far as it has gone…A minister who shows any sign of confidence is always called complacent. If he fails to do so, he is labelled defeatist. For my part I try to steer a middle course—[Interruption]—neither raising undue expectations [Hon. Members: ‘Hitler missed the bus’] which are unlikely to be fulfilled, nor making people’s flesh creep by painting pictures of unmitigated gloom. A great many times some hon. Members have repeated the phrase ‘Hitler missed the bus’—[Hon. Members: ‘You said it’]…While I retain my complete confidence on our ultimate victory, I do not think that the people of this country yet realise the extent or the imminence of the threat which is impending against us [An Hon. Member: ‘We said that five years ago’].
When the debate ended the following night, thirty-three Tories voted against their own party on the Adjournment Motion, and a further sixty abstained. Though Chamberlain retained a parliamentary majority, it was plain that his Conservative government had lost the nation’s confidence. This was not merely the consequence of the Norway campaign, but because through eight fumbling months it had exposed its lack of stomach for war. An all-party coalition was indispensable. Labour would not serve under Chamberlain. Winston Churchill became Britain’s prime minister following a meeting between himself, Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and Tory chief whip David Margesson on the afternoon of 9 May 1940, at which Halifax declared his own unsuitability for the post, as a member of the House of Lords who would be obliged to delegate direction of the war to Churchill in the Commons. In truth, some expedient could have been adopted to allow the Foreign Secretary to return to the Commons. But Halifax possessed sufficient self-knowledge to recognise that no more than Neville Chamberlain did he possess the stuff of a war leader.
While much of the ruling class disliked and mistrusted the new premier, he was the overwhelming choice of the British people. With remarkably sure instinct, they perceived that if they must wage war, the leadership of a warrior was needed. David Reynolds has observed that when the Gallipoli campaign failed in 1915, many people wished to blame Churchill—then, as in 1940, First Lord of the Admiralty—while after Norway nobody did. ‘It was a marvel,’ Churchill wrote in an unpublished draft of his war memoirs, ‘I really do not know how—I survived and maintained my position in public esteem while all the blame was thrown on poor Mr Chamberlain.’ He may also have perceived his own good fortune that he had not achieved the highest office in earlier years, or even in the earlier months of the war. Had he done so, it is likely that by May 1940 his country would have tired of the excesses which he would surely have committed, while being no more capable than Chamberlain of stemming the tide of fate on the Continent. Back in 1935, Stanley Baldwin explained to a friend his unwillingness to appoint Churchill to his own cabinet: ‘If there is going to be a war—and who can say there is not—we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.’ Baldwin’s tone was jocular and patronising, yet there proved to be something in what he said.
In May 1940 only generals and admirals knew the extent of Churchill’s responsibility for Britain’s ill-starred Scandinavian deployments. Nonetheless the familiar view, that he was sole architect of disaster, seems overstated. Had British troops been better trained, motivated and led, they would have made a better showing against Hitler’s forces, which repeatedly worsted them in Norway while often inferior in numbers. The British Army’s failure reflected decades of neglect, together with institutional weaknesses that would influence the fortunes of British arms through the years which followed. These were symbolically attested by a colonel who noticed among officers’ baggage being landed at Namsos on the central Norwegian coast ‘several fishing rods and many sporting guns’. No German officer would have gone to war with such frivolous accoutrements.
Now Halifax wrote disdainfully to a friend: ‘I don’t think WSC will be a very good PM though…the country will think he gives them a fillip.’ The Foreign Secretary told his junior minister R.A. Butler, when they discussed his own refusal to offer himself for the premiership: ‘It’s all a great pity. You know my reasons, it’s no use discussing that—but the gangsters will shortly be in complete control.’ Humbler folk disagreed. Lancashire housewife Nella Last wrote in her diary on 11 May: ‘If I had to spend my whole life with a man, I’d choose Mr Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked. He has a funny face, like a bulldog living in our street who has done more to drive out unwanted dogs and cats…than all the complaints of householders.’ London correspondent Mollie Panter-Downes told New Yorker readers: ‘Events are moving so fast that England acquired a new Premier almost absent-mindedly…It’s paradoxical but true that the British, for all their suspicious dislike of brilliance, are beginning to think they’d be safer with a bit of dynamite around.’ National Labour MP Harold Nicolson, a poor politician but a fine journalist
and diarist, wrote in the Spectator of Churchill’s ‘Elizabethan zest for life…His wit…rises high in the air like some strong fountain, flashing in every sunbeam, and renewing itself with ever-increasing jets and gusts of image and association.’
Though Churchill’s appointment was made by the King on the advice of Chamberlain, rather than following any elective process, popular acclaim bore him to the premiership—and to the role as Minister of Defence which he also appropriated. Tory MP Leo Amery was among those sceptical that Churchill could play so many parts: ‘How Winston thinks that he can be Prime Minister, co-ordinator of defence and leader of the House all at once, is puzzling, and confirms my belief that he really means the present arrangement to be temporary. Certainly no one can coordinate defence properly who is not prepared to be active head of the three Chiefs of Staff and in fact directly responsible for plans.’ Critics were still expressing dismay about Churchill’s joint role as national leader and defence minister three years later. Yet this was prompted not by mere personal conceit, but by dismay at the shocking lack of coordination between the services which characterised the Norway campaign. And posterity perceives, as did he himself at the time, that beyond his own eagerness to run Britain’s war machine, there was no other political or military figure to whom delegation of such power would have been appropriate.
In one of the most famous and moving passages of his memoirs, Churchill declared himself on 10 May ‘conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.’ He thrilled to his own ascent to Britain’s leadership. Perhaps he allowed himself a twitch of satisfaction that he could at last with impunity smoke cigars through cabinet meetings, a habit that had annoyed his predecessor. If, however, he cherished a belief that it would be in his gift to shape strategy, events immediately disabused him.
At dawn on 10 May, a few hours before Churchill was summoned to Buckingham Palace, Hitler’s armies stormed across the frontiers of neutral Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Captain David Strangeways, serving with the British Expeditionary Force near Lille just inside the French border, bridled at the impertinence of an orderly room clerk who rushed into the quarters where he lay abed shouting: ‘David, sir, David!’ Then the officer realised that the clerk was passing the order for Operation David, the BEF’s advance from the fortified line which it had held since the previous autumn, deep into Belgium to meet the advancing Germans. Though the Belgians had declared themselves neutrals since 1936, Allied war planning felt obliged to anticipate an imperative requirement to offer them aid if Germany violated their territory.
David perfectly fulfilled Hitler’s predictions and wishes. On 10 May the British, together with the French First and Seventh Armies, hastened to abandon laboriously prepared defensive positions. They mounted their trucks and armoured vehicles, then set off in long columns eastward towards the proffered ‘matador’s cloak’, in Liddell Hart’s phrase, which the Germans flourished before them in Belgium. Further south in the Ardennes forest, Panzer columns thrashed forward to launch one of the war’s great surprises, a thrust at the centre of the Allied line, left inexcusably weak by the deployments of the Allied supreme commander, France’s General Maurice Gamelin. Guderian’s and Reinhardt’s tanks, racing for the Meuse, easily brushed aside French cavalry posturing in their path. Luftwaffe paratroops and glider-borne forces burst upon the Dutch and Belgian frontier fortresses. Stukas and Messerschmitts poured bombs and machine-gun fire upon bewildered formations of four armies.
No more than his nation did the prime minister grasp the speed of approaching catastrophe. The Allied leaders supposed themselves at the beginning of a long campaign. The war was already eight months old, but thus far neither side had displayed impatience for a decisive confrontation. The German descent on Scandinavia was a sideshow. Hitler’s assault on France promised the French and British armies the opportunity, so they supposed, to confront his legions on level terms. The paper strengths of the two sides in the west were similar—about 140 divisions apiece, of which just nine were British. Allied commanders and governments believed that weeks, if not months, would elapse before the critical clash came. Churchill retired to bed on the night of 10 May knowing that the Allies’ strategic predicament was grave, but bursting with thoughts and plans, and believing that he had time to implement them.
Events which tower in the perception of posterity must at the time compete for attention with trifles. The BBC radio announcer who told the nation of the German invasion of Belgium and Holland followed this by reporting: ‘British troops have landed in Iceland,’ as if the second news item atoned for the first. The Times of 11 May 1940 reported the issue of an arrest warrant at Brighton bankruptcy court for a playwright named Walter Hackett, said to have fled to America. An army court martial was described, at which a colonel was charged with ‘undue familiarity’ with a sergeant in his searchlight unit. What would soldiers think, demanded the prosecutor, on hearing a commanding officer address a sergeant as ‘Eric’? Advertisements for Player’s cigarettes exhorted smokers: ‘When cheerfulness is in danger of disturbance, light a Player…with a few puffs put trouble in its proper place.’ The Irish Tourist Association promised: ‘Ireland will welcome you.’ On the front page, a blue Persian cat was offered for sale at £2.10s: ‘house-trained: grandsire Ch. Laughton Laurel; age 7 weeks—Bachelor, Grove Place, Aldenham’. Among Business Offers, a ‘Gentleman with extensive experience wishes join established business, Town or Country, capital available.’ A golf report on the sports page was headed: ‘What the public want.’ There was a poem by Walter de la Mare: ‘O lovely England, whose ancient peace/War’s woful dangers strain and fret.’
The German blitzkrieg was reported under a double-column headline: ‘Hitler strikes at the Low Countries’. Commentaries variously asserted: ‘Belgians confident of victory; ten times as strong as in 1914’; ‘The side of Holland’s economic life of greatest interest to Hitler is doubtless her agricultural and allied activities’; ‘The Military Outlook: No Surprise This Time’. The Times’s editorial column declared:‘It may be taken as certain that every detail has been prepared for an instant strategic reply…The Grand Alliance of our time for the destruction of the forces of treachery and oppression is being steadily marshalled.’
A single column at the right of the main news, on page six, proclaimed: ‘New prime minister. Mr Churchill accepts’. The news-paper’s correspondence was dominated by discussion of Parliament’s Norway debate three days earlier, which had precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Mr Geoffrey Vickers urged that Lord Halifax was by far the best-qualified minister to lead a national government, assisted by a Labour leader of the Commons. Mr Quintin Hogg, Tory MP for Oxford, noted that many of those who had voted against the government were serving officers. Mr Henry Morris-Jones, Liberal MP for Denbigh, deplored the vote that had taken place, observing complacently that he himself had abstained. The news from France was mocked by a beautiful spring day, with bluebells and primroses everywhere in flower.
‘Chips’ Channon, millionaire Tory MP, diarist and consummate ass, wrote on 10 May: ‘Perhaps the darkest day in English history…We were all sad, angry and felt cheated and out-witted.’ His distress was inspired by the fall of Chamberlain, not the blitzkrieg in France. Churchill himself knew better than any man how grudgingly he had been offered the premiership, and how tenuous was his grasp on power. Much of the Conservative Party hated him, not least because he had twice in his life ‘ratted’—changed sides in the House of Commons. He was remembered as architect of the disastrous 1915 Gallipoli campaign, 1919 sponsor of war against the Bolsheviks in Russia, 1933-34 opponent of Indian self-government, 1936 supporter of King Edward VIII in the Abdication crisis, savage backbench critic of both Baldwin and Chamberlain, Tory prime ministers through his own ‘wilderness years’.
In May 1940, while few influential
figures questioned Churchill’s brilliance or oratorical genius, they perceived his career as wreathed in misjudgements. Robert Rhodes-James subtitled his 1970 biography of Churchill before he ascended to the premiership A Study in Failure. As early as 1914, the historian A.G. Gardiner wrote an extraordinarily shrewd and admiring assessment of Churchill, which concluded equivocally: ‘ “Keep your eye on Churchill” should be the watchword of these days. Remember, he is a soldier first, last and always. He will write his name big on our future. Let us take care he does not write it in blood.’
Now, amidst the crisis precipitated by Hitler’s blitzkrieg, Churchill’s contemporaries could not forget that he had been wrong about much even in the recent past, and even in the military sphere in which he professed expertise. During the approach to war, he described the presence of aircraft over the battlefield as a mere ‘additional complication’. He claimed that modern anti-tank weapons neutered the powers of ‘the poor tank’, and that ‘the submarine will be mastered…There will be losses, but nothing to affect the scale of events.’ On Christmas Day 1939 he wrote to Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord: ‘I feel we may compare the position now very favourably with that of 1914.’ He had doubted that the Germans would invade Scandinavia. When they did so, Churchill told the Commons on 11 April: ‘In my view, which is shared by my skilled advisers, Herr Hitler has committed a grave strategic error in spreading the war so far to the north…We shall take all we want of this Norwegian coast now, with an enormous increase in the facility and the efficiency of our blockade.’ Even if some of Churchill’s false prophecies and mistaken expressions of confidence were unknown to the public, they were common currency among ministers and commanders.
