by Max Hastings
Posterity owes little to Churchill’s wayward son, Randolph, but a debt is due for his account of a visit to Admiralty House on the morning of May 18:
I went up to my father’s bedroom51. He was standing in front of his basin and shaving with his old-fashioned Valet razor …
“Sit down, dear boy, and read the papers while I finish shaving.” I did as told. After two or three minutes of hacking away, he half turned and said: “I think I see my way through.” He resumed his shaving. I was astounded, and said: “Do you mean that we can avoid defeat?” (which seemed credible) “or beat the bastards?” (which seemed incredible).
He flung his Valet razor into the basin, swung around and said:—“Of course I mean we can beat them.”
Me: “Well, I’m all for it, but I don’t see how you can do it.”
By this time he had dried and sponged his face and turning round to me, said with great intensity: “I shall drag the United States in.”
Here was a characteristic Churchillian flash of revelation. The prospect of American belligerence was remote. For years, Neville Chamberlain had repeatedly and indeed rudely rebuffed advances from Franklin Roosevelt. Yet already the new prime minister recognised that U.S. aid alone might make Allied victory possible. He was obliged to acknowledge the probability—though, unlike France’s generals, he refused to bow to its inevitability—of German victory on the Continent. Reports from the battlefield grew steadily graver. Churchill urged the Chiefs of Staff to consider bringing large reinforcements from India and Palestine, and holding back some tank units then in transit from Britain to the BEF. The threat of a sudden German descent on England, spearheaded by paratroops, seized his imagination, unrealistic though it was.
A Home Intelligence report suggested to the government that national morale was badly shaken: “It must be remembered that the defence52 of the Low Countries had been continually built up in the press … Not one person in a thousand could visualise the Germans breaking through into France … A relieved acceptance of Mr. Churchill as prime minister allowed people to believe that a change of leadership would, in itself, solve the consequences of Mr. Chamberlain. Reports sent in yesterday and this morning show that disquiet and personal fear have returned.”
On the evening of May 18, the War Cabinet agreed that Churchill should broadcast to the nation, making plain the gravity of the emergency. Ministers were told that Mussolini had rejected Britain’s proposal for an Italian declaration of neutrality. This prompted Navy Minister A. V. Alexander to urge the immediate occupation of Crete, as a base for operations against Italy in the Mediterranean. Churchill dismissed the idea out of hand, saying that Britain was much too committed elsewhere to embark upon gratuitous adventures.
On the morning of Sunday, May 19, it was learned that the BEF had evacuated Arras, increasing the peril of its isolation from the main French forces. Emerging together from a meeting, Ironside said to Eden: “This is the end of the British Empire.” The secretary for war noted: “Militarily, I did not see how53 he could be gainsaid.” Yet it was hard for colleagues to succumb to despair, when their leader marvellously sustained his wit. That same bleak Sunday, the prime minister said to Eden: “About time number 1754 turned up, isn’t it?” The two of them, at a Cannes casino’s roulette wheel in 1938, had backed the number and won twice.
At noon, Churchill was driven across Kent to Chartwell, his beloved old home, shuttered for the duration. He sought an interlude of tranquillity in which to prepare his broadcast to the nation. But he had been feeding his goldfish for only a few minutes when he was interrupted by a telephone call. Gort, in France, was seeking sanction to fall back on the sea at Dunkirk if his predicament worsened. The C-in-C was told instead to seek to reestablish contact with the French army, on his right; German spearheads were in between. The French, in their turn, would be urged to counterattack towards him. The Belgians were pleading for the BEF to hold a more northerly line beside their own troops. The War Cabinet determined, however, that the vital priority was to reestablish a common front with the main French armies. The Belgians must be left to their fate, while British forces redeployed southwestwards towards Arras and Amiens.
Broadcasting to the British people that night, Churchill asserted a confidence which he did not feel, saying that the line in France would be stabilised, but he also warned of the peril the nation faced. “This is one of the most awe-striking periods in the long history of France and Britain. It is also beyond doubt the most sublime. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: ‘Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour … for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.’”
This was the first of his great clarion calls to the nation. It is impossible to overstate its impact upon the British people, and indeed upon the listening world. He asserted his resolve, and his listeners responded. That night, he dispatched a minute to Ismay reasserting his refusal to send further RAF squadrons to France. Every fighter would be needed “if it becomes necessary to evacuate the BEF.” It was obvious that this decision would be received badly by the French, and not all his subordinates supported it. His personal scientific and economic adviser, Frederick Lindemann—“the Prof”—penned a note of protest.
Britain’s forces could exert only a marginal influence on the outcome of the battle for France. Even if every aircraft the RAF possessed had been dispatched to the Continent, such a commitment would not have averted Allied defeat. It would merely have sacrificed the squadrons that later won the Battle of Britain. In May 1940, however, such things were much less plain. As France tottered on the brink of collapse, with eight million terrified refugees clogging roads in a fevered exodus southwards, the bitterness of her politicians and generals mounted against an ally that matched extravagant rhetoric with refusal to provide the only important aid in its gift. France’s leaders certainly responded feebly to Hitler’s blitzkrieg. But their rancour towards Britain merits understanding. Churchill’s perception of British self-interest has been vindicated by history, but scarcely deserved the gratitude of Frenchmen.
He sent an unashamedly desperate message to Roosevelt, regretting America’s refusal to lend destroyers. More, he warned that while his own government would never surrender, a successor administration might parley with Germany, using the Royal Navy as its “sole remaining bargaining counter55 … If this country was left by the United States to its fate, no one would have the right to blame those men responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants. Excuse me, Mr. President, putting this nightmare bluntly.” In Hitler’s hands, Britain’s fleet would pose a grave threat to the United States.
If this was a brutal prospect to lay before Roosevelt, it was by no means a bluff. At that moment, Churchill could not know that Parliament and the British people would stick with him to the end. Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservative Party. Even before the crisis in France, a significant part of Britain’s ruling class was susceptible to a compromise peace. Following military catastrophe, it was entirely plausible that Churchill’s government would fall, just as Chamberlain’s had done, to be replaced by an administration which sought terms from Hitler. Only in the months which followed would the world, and Churchill himself, gradually come to perceive that the people of Britain were willing to risk everything under his leadership.
On May 20, he told the Chiefs of Staff that the time had come to consider whether residual Norwegian operations around Narvik should be sustained, when troops and ships were urgently needed elsewhere. On the Continent, the Germans were driving south and west so fast that it seemed doubtful whether the BEF could regain touch with the main French armies. Gort was still striving to pull back forces from the Scheldt. That night, German units passed Amiens on the hot, dusty road to Abbeville, cutting off the BEF from its supply bases. Still Churchill declined to despair. He told the War
Cabinet late on the morning of the twenty-first that “the situation was more favourable than certain of the more obvious symptoms would indicate.” In the north, the British still had local superiority of numbers. Fears focused on the perceived pusillanimity of the French, both politicians and soldiers. That day, a British armoured thrust south from Arras failed to break through. The BEF was isolated, along with elements of the French First Army. Calais and Boulogne remained in British hands, but inaccessible by land.
The House of Commons on May 20, with the kind of inspired madness that contributed to the legend of 1940, debated a Colonial Welfare Bill. Many people in Britain lacked understanding of the full horror of the Allies’ predicament. Newspaper readers continued to receive encouraging tidings. The Evening News headlined on May 17: BRITISH TROOPS SUCCESS. On the nineteenth, the Sunday Dispatch headline read: ATTACKS LESS POWERFUL. Even two days later, the Evening News front page proclaimed: ENEMY ATTACKS BEATEN OFF. An editorial in the New Statesman urged that “the government should at once56 grapple with the minor, but important problem of Anglo-Mexican relations.”
Gort’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Henry Pownall, complained bitterly on May 20 about the absence of clear instructions from London: “Nobody minds going down57 fighting, but the long and many days of indigence and recently the entire lack of higher direction … have been terribly wearing on the nerves of all of us.” But when orders did come from the prime minister three days later—for a counterattack south-eastwards by the entire BEF—Pownall was even angrier: “Can nobody prevent him58 trying to conduct operations himself as a super Commander-in-Chief? How does he think we are to collect eight divisions and attack as he suggests? Have we no front to hold? He can have no conception of our situation and condition … The man’s mad.”
Only the port of Dunkirk still offered an avenue of escape from the Continent, and escape now seemed the BEF’s highest credible aspiration. On May 22 and 23, the British awaited tidings of the promised French counteroffensive northeastward towards Gort. Gen. Maxime Weygand, who had supplanted the sacked Gamelin as Allied supreme commander, declared this to be in progress. In the absence of visible movement Churchill remained sceptical. If Weygand’s thrust failed, evacuation would become the only British option. Churchill reported as much to the king on the night of May 23, as Boulogne was evacuated. On the night of the twenty-fourth, he fumed to Ismay about Gort’s failure to launch a force towards Calais, to link up with its garrison. He demanded to know how men and guns could be better used. He concluded, in the first overtly bitter and histrionic words he had deployed against Britain’s soldiers since the campaign began: “Of course, if one side fights and the other does not, the war is apt to become somewhat unequal.” Ironside, the CIGS, told the Defence Committee that evening that if the BEF was indeed evacuated by sea from France, a large proportion of its men might be lost.
Churchill was now preoccupied with three issues: rescue of Gort’s men from Dunkirk; deployment of further units of the British Army to renew the battle in France, following the BEF’s withdrawal; and defence of the home island against invasion. Reynaud dispatched a bitter message to London on May 24, denouncing the British retreat to the sea and blaming this for the failure of Weygand’s counteroffensive—which in truth had never taken place. “Everything is complete confusion,”59 Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, noted in his diary on the twenty-fifth, “no communications and no one knows what’s going on, except that everything’s black as black.”
Churchill cabled to the dominion prime ministers, warning that an invasion of Britain might be imminent. He rejoiced that reinforcements from the Empire were on their way, and asserted his confidence that the Royal Navy and RAF should be able to frustrate an assault, following which “our land defence will deal with any sea-borne survivors after some rough work.” He rejected the notion of a public appeal to the United States. He feared, surely correctly, that such a message would have scant appeal to a nation already disposed to dismiss aid to Britain as wasted motion. In this, as in his judgement of shifting American moods through the months that followed, he displayed deep wisdom. A Gallup poll showed Americans60 still overwhelmingly opposed, by thirteen to one, to participation in the European conflict.
On May 25, Churchill dispatched a personal message to Brig. Claude Nicholson, commanding the British force in Calais, ordering that his men must fight to the end. The Belgians were collapsing. Gort cancelled his last planned counterattack southwards, instead sending north the two divisions earmarked for it to plug the gap between British and Belgian forces. That evening, at a meeting of the Defence Committee, Churchill accepted the conclusion which Gort, now out of contact with London, had already reached and begun to act upon. The BEF must withdraw to the coast for evacuation. The commander-in-chief’s order, issued in advance of consent from Britain, represented his most notable contribution to the campaign, and by no means a negligible one. The prime minister ordered that six skeleton divisions in Britain should be urgently prepared for active service, though scant means existed to accomplish this. Artillery, antitank weapons, transport, even small arms were lacking. He acknowledged that France’s leaders, resigned to defeat, would probably depose Reynaud and make terms with Hitler. Henceforward, the future of the French fleet was much in his mind. In German hands, these warships might drastically improve the odds favouring a successful invasion of Britain. That night, Ironside resigned as CIGS, to become commander-in-chief Home Forces. The general had never commanded Churchill’s confidence, while Sir John Dill, Ironside’s vice chief, did. Next day Dill, fifty-nine years old, clever and sensitive though seldom in good health, became head of the British Army.
At nine o’clock on the morning of May 26, Churchill told the War Cabinet that there was a good chance of “getting off a considerable proportion of the British Expeditionary Force.” Paul Reynaud arrived in London. He warned the prime minister over lunch that if Germany occupied a large part of France, the nation’s old hero Marshal Philippe Pétain would probably call for an armistice. Reynaud dismissed British fears that the Germans were bent on an immediate invasion of their island. Hitler would strike for Paris, he said, and of course he was right. Churchill told Reynaud that Britain would fight on, whatever transpired. Following a break while Churchill met the War Cabinet, the two leaders resumed their talks. Churchill pressed for Weygand to issue an order for the BEF to fall back on the coast. This was designed to frustrate charges of British betrayal. Reynaud duly requested such a message, to endorse the reality of what was already taking place.
At a four-hour Cabinet meeting that afternoon, following Reynaud’s departure, the merits of seeking a settlement with Hitler were discussed. Churchill hoped that France might receive terms that precluded her occupation by the Germans. Halifax, the foreign secretary, expressed his desire to seek Italian mediation with Hitler to secure terms for Britain. He had held preliminary talks with Mussolini’s ambassador in London about such a course. Churchill was sceptical, saying this presupposed that a deal might be made merely by returning Germany’s old colonies and making concessions in the Mediterranean. “No such option was open to us,” said the prime minister.
Six Alexander Cadogan, who joined the meeting after half an hour, found Churchill “too rambling and romantic61 and sentimental and temperamental.” This was harsh. The prime minister bore vast burdens. It behoved him to be circumspect in all dealings with the old appeasers among his colleagues. There were those in Whitehall who, rather than being stirred by Churchill’s appeals to recognise a great historic moment, curled their lips. Chamberlain’s private secretary, Arthur Rucker, responded contemptuously to the ringing phrases in one of the prime minister’s missives: “He is still thinking of his books.”62 Eric Seal, the only one of Churchill’s private secretaries who established no close rapport with him, muttered about “blasted rhetoric.”
A substantial part of the British ruling class, MPs and peers alike, had since September 1939 lacked fai
th in the possibility of military victory. Although Churchill was himself an aristocrat, he was widely mistrusted by his own kind. Since the 1917 Russian Revolution, many British grandees, including such dukes as Westminster, Wellington and Buccleuch and such lesser peers as Lord Phillimore, had shown themselves much more hostile to Soviet Communism than to European Fascism. Their patriotism was never in doubt. However, their enthusiasm for a fight to the finish with Hitler, which they feared would end in rubble and ruin, was less assured. Lord Hankey observed acidly before making a speech to the House of Lords early in May that he “would be addressing63 most of the members of the Fifth Column.”
Lord Tavistock, soon to become Duke of Bedford, a pacifist and plausible Nazi collaborator, wrote to former prime minister David Lloyd George that Hitler’s strength was “so great … it is madness64 to suppose we can beat him by war on the continent.” On May 15, Tavistock urged Lloyd George that peace should be made “now rather than later … if the Germans received fair peace terms a dozen Hitlers could never start another war on an inadequate … pretext.” Harold Nicolson wrote: “It is not the descendants65 of the old governing classes who display the greatest enthusiasm for their leader.” Likewise, some financial magnates were sceptical of any possibility of British victory, and thus of the new prime minister: “Mr. Chamberlain is the idol of the business men … They do not have the same personal feelings for Mr. Churchill … There are awful moments when they feel that Mr. Churchill does not find them interesting.”
