by Max Hastings
There were also defeatists lower down the social scale. Muriel Green, who worked at her family’s garage in Norfolk, recorded a conversation at a local tennis match with a grocer’s roundsman and a schoolmaster on May 23. “I think they’re going to beat us66, don’t you,” said the roundsman. “Yes,” said the schoolmaster. He added that, as the Nazis were very keen on sport, he expected “we’d still be able to play tennis if they did win.” Muriel Green wrote: “J said Mr. M. was saying we should paint a swastika under the door knocker [sic] ready. We all agreed we shouldn’t know what to do if they invade. After that we played tennis, very hard exciting play for 2 hrs, and forgot all about the war.”
In those last days of May, the prime minister must have perceived a real possibility, even a likelihood, that if he himself appeared irrationally intransigent, the old Conservative grandees would reassert themselves. Amid the collapse of all the hopes on which Britain’s military struggle against Hitler were founded, it was not fanciful to suppose that a peace party might gain control in Britain. Some historians have made much of the fact that at this War Cabinet meeting, Churchill failed to dismiss out of hand an approach to Mussolini. He did not flatly contradict Halifax when the foreign secretary said that if the Duce offered terms for a general settlement “which did not postulate the destruction of our independence … we should be foolish if we did not accept them.” Churchill conceded that “if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies, he would jump at it.” At the following day’s War Cabinet meeting, he indicated that if Hitler was prepared to offer peace in exchange for the restoration of his old colonies and the overlordship of central Europe, a negotiation could be possible.
It seems essential to consider Churchill’s words in context. First, they were made in the midst of long, weary discussions, during which he was taking elaborate pains to appear reasonable. Halifax spoke with the voice of logic. Amid shattering military defeat, even Churchill dared not offer his colleagues a vision of British victory. In those Dunkirk days, the director of military intelligence told a BBC correspondent: “We’re finished. We’ve lost the army and we’ll never have time or strength to build another.” Churchill did not challenge the view of those who assumed that the war would end, sooner or later, with a negotiated settlement rather than with a British army marching into Berlin. He pitched his case low, because there was no alternative. A display of exaggerated confidence would have invited ridicule. He relied solely upon the argument that there was no more to lose by fighting on, than by throwing in the hand.
How would his colleagues, or even posterity, have assessed his judgement had he sought, at those meetings, to offer the prospect of military triumph? To understand what happened in Britain in the summer of 1940, it is essential to acknowledge the logic of impending defeat. This was what created tensions between the hearts and minds even of staunch and patriotic British people. The best aspiration they and their prime minister could entertain was a manly determination to survive today, and pray for a better tomorrow. The War Cabinet discussions between May 26 and 28 took place while it was still doubtful that any significant portion of the BEF could be saved from France.
At the meeting of May 26, with the support of Attlee, Greenwood and eventually Chamberlain, Churchill summed up for the view that there was nothing to be lost by fighting on, because no terms which Hitler might offer in the future were likely to be worse than those now available. Having discussed the case for a parley, he dismissed it, even if Halifax refused to do so. At seven o’clock that evening, an hour after the War Cabinet meeting ended, the Admiralty signalled the flag officer Dover, Vice Adm. Bertram Ramsay: “Operation Dynamo is to commence.” Destroyers of the Royal Navy, aided by a fleet of small craft, began to evacuate the BEF from Dunkirk.
That night yet another painful order was forced upon Churchill. The small British force at Calais, drawn from the Rifle Brigade, possessed only nuisance value. But everything possible had to be done to distract German forces from the Dunkirk perimeter. The Rifles must resist to the last. Ismay wrote: “The decision affected us all67 very deeply, especially perhaps Churchill. He was unusually silent during dinner that evening, and ate and drank with evident distaste.” He asked a private secretary, John Martin, to find for him a passage in George Borrow’s 1843 prayer for England. Martin identified the lines next day: “Fear not the result, for either thy end be a majestic and an enviable one, or God shall perpetuate thy reign upon the waters.”
On the morning of May 27, even as British troops were beginning to embark at Dunkirk, Churchill asked the leaders of the armed forces to prepare a memorandum, setting out the nation’s prospects for resisting invasion if France fell. Within a couple of hours, the Chiefs of Staff submitted an eleven-paragraph response, which identified the key issues with notable insight. As long as the RAF was “in being,” they wrote, its aircraft together with the warships of the Royal Navy should be able to prevent an invasion. If air superiority was lost, however, the navy could not indefinitely hold the Channel. Should the Germans secure a beachhead in southeast England, British home forces would be incapable of evicting them. The Chiefs pinpointed the air battle, Britain’s ability to defend its key installations and especially aircraft factories, as the decisive factor in determining the future course of the war. They concluded with heartening words: “the real test is whether the morale of our fighting personnel and civil population will counter-balance the numerical and material advantages which Germany enjoys. We believe it will.”
The War Cabinet debated at length, and finally accepted, the Chiefs’ report. It was agreed that further efforts should be made to induce the Americans to provide substantial aid. An important message arrived from Lord Lothian, British ambassador in Washington, suggesting that Britain should invite the United States to lease basing facilities in Trinidad, Newfoundland and Bermuda. Churchill opposed any such unilateral offer. America had “given us practically no help in the war,” he said. “Now that they saw how great was the danger, their attitude was that they wanted to keep everything that would help us for their own defence.” This would remain the case until the end of the battle for France. There was no doubt of Roosevelt’s desire to help, but he was constrained by the terms of the Neutrality Act imposed by Congress. On May 17 Gen. George Marshall, chief of staff of the army, expounded to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau his objections to shipping American arms to the Allies: “It is a drop in the bucket68 on the other side and it is a very vital necessity on this side and that is that. Tragic as it is, that is it.” Between May 23 and June 3 Secretary of War Harry Woodring, an ardent isolationist, deliberately delayed shipment to Britain of war matériel condemned as surplus. He insisted that there must be prior public advertisement before such equipment was sold to the Allies. On June 5, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee rejected an administration proposal to sell ships and planes to Britain. The U.S. War Department declined to supply bombs to fit dive-bombers which the French had already bought and paid for.
In the last days of May, a deal for Britain to purchase twenty U.S. patrol torpedo boats was scuttled when news of it leaked to isolationist Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts. As chairman of the Senate’s Navy Affairs Committee, Walsh referred the plan to the attorney general—who declared it illegal. In mid-June, the U.S. chiefs of staff recommended that no further war matériel should be sent to Britain, and that no private contractor should be allowed to accept an order which might compromise the needs of the U.S. armed forces. None of this directly influenced the campaign in France. But it spoke volumes, all unwelcome in London and Paris, about the prevailing American mood towards Europe’s war.
It was a small consolation that other powerful voices across the Atlantic were urging Britain’s cause. The New York Times attacked Col. Charles Lindbergh, America’s arch-isolationist flying hero, and asserted the mutuality of Anglo-American interests. Lindbergh, said the Times, was “an ignorant young man if he trusts his own premise that
it makes no difference to us whether we are deprived of the historic defense of British sea power in the Atlantic Ocean.” The Republican New York Herald Tribune astonished many Americans by declaring boldly, “The least costly solution in both life69 and welfare would be to declare war on Germany at once.” Yet even if President Roosevelt had wished to heed the urgings of such interventionists and offer assistance to the Allies, he had before him the example of Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration he had served. Wilson was renounced by his own legislature in 1919 for making commitments abroad—in the Versailles Treaty—which outreached the will of the American people. Roosevelt had no intention of emulating him.
Chamberlain reported on May 27 that he had spoken the previous evening to Stanley Bruce, Australian high commissioner in London, who argued that Britain’s position would be bleak if France surrendered. Bruce, a shrewd and respected spokesman for his dominion, urged seeking American or Italian mediation with Hitler. Australia’s prime minister, Robert Menzies, was fortunately made of sterner stuff. From Canberra, Menzies merely enquired what assistance his country’s troops could provide. By autumn, three Australian divisions were deployed in the Middle East. Churchill told Chamberlain to make plain to Bruce that France’s surrender would not influence Britain’s determination to fight on. He urged ministers—and emphasised the message in writing a few days later—to present bold faces to the world. Likewise, a little later, he instructed Britain’s missions abroad to entertain lavishly, prompting embassy parties in Madrid and Berne. In Churchill’s house, even amid disaster there was no place for glum countenances.
At a further War Cabinet meeting that afternoon, Halifax found himself unsupported when he returned to his theme of the previous day, seeking agreement that Britain should solicit Mussolini’s help in exploring terms from Hitler. Churchill said that, at that moment, British prestige in Europe was very low. It could be revived only by defiance. “If, after two or three months, we could show that we were still unbeaten, we should be no worse off than we should be if we were now to abandon the struggle. Let us therefore avoid being dragged down the slippery slope with France.” If terms were offered, he would be prepared to consider them. But if the British were invited to send a delegate to Paris to join with the French in suing for peace with Germany, the answer must be no. The War Cabinet agreed.
Halifax wrote in his diary: “I thought Winston talked70 the most frightful rot. I said exactly what I thought of [the foreign secretary’s opponents in the War Cabinet], adding that if that was really their view, our ways must part.” In the garden afterwards, when he repeated his threat of resignation, Churchill soothed him with soft words. Halifax concluded in his diary record: “It does drive one to despair when he works himself up into a passion of emotion when he ought to make his brain think and reason.” He and Chamberlain recoiled from Churchill’s “theatricality,” as Cadogan described it. Cold men both, they failed to perceive in such circumstances the necessity for at least a semblance of boldness. But Chamberlain’s eventual support for Churchill’s stance was critically important in deflecting the foreign secretary’s proposals.
Whichever narratives of these exchanges are consulted, the facts seem plain. Halifax believed that Britain should explore terms. Churchill must have been deeply alarmed by the prospect of the foreign secretary, the man whom only three weeks earlier most of the Conservative Party wanted as prime minister, quitting his government. It was vital, at this moment of supreme crisis, that Britain should present a united face to the world. Churchill could never thereafter have had private confidence in Halifax. He continued to endure him as a colleague, however, because he needed to sustain the support of the Tories. It was a measure of Churchill’s apprehension about the resolve of Britain’s ruling class that it would be another seven months before he felt strong enough to consign “the Holy Fox” to exile.
The legend of Britain in the summer of 1940 as a nation united in defiance of Hitler is rooted in reality. It is not diminished by asserting that if another man had been prime minister, the political faction resigned to seeking a negotiated peace would probably have prevailed. What Churchill grasped, and Halifax and others did not, was that the mere gesture of exploring peace terms would have impacted disastrously upon Britain’s position. Even if Hitler’s response proved unacceptable to a British government, the clear, simple Churchillian posture of rejecting any parley with the forces of evil would be irretrievably compromised.
It is impossible to declare with confidence at what moment during the summer of 1940 Churchill’s grip upon power, as well as his hold upon the loyalties of the British people, became secure. What is plain is that, in the last days of May, he did not perceive himself proof against domestic foes. He survived in office not because he overcame the private doubts of ministerial and military sceptics, which he did not, but by the face of courage and defiance that he presented to the nation. He appealed over the heads of those who knew too much, to those who were willing to sustain a visceral stubbornness. “His world is built upon the primacy71 of public over private relationships,” wrote the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in a fine essay on Churchill, “upon the supreme value of action, of the battle between simple good and simple evil, between life and death; but above all battle. He has always fought.” The simplicity of Churchill’s commitment, matched by the grandeur of the language in which he expressed this, seized popular imagination. In the press, in the pubs and everywhere that Churchill himself appeared on his travels across the country, the British people passionately applauded his defiance. Conservative seekers after truce were left beached and isolated; sullenly resentful, but impotent.
Evelyn Waugh’s fictional Halberdier officer, the fastidious Guy Crouchback, was among many members of the British upper classes who were slow to abandon their disdain for the prime minister, displaying an attitude common among real-life counterparts such as Waugh himself:
Some of Mr. Churchill’s broadcasts72 had been played on the mess wireless-set. Guy had found them painfully boastful and they had, most of them, been immediately followed by the news of some disaster … Guy knew of Mr. Churchill only as a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, an advocate of the Popular Front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and Lloyd George. He was asked: “Uncle, what sort of fellow is this Winston Churchill?” “Like Hore-Belisha [a sacked secretary for war, widely considered a charlatan], except that for some reason his hats are thought to be funny” … Here Major Erskine leant across the table. “Churchill is about the only man who may save us from losing this war,” he said. It was the first time that Guy had heard a Halberdier suggest that any result, other than complete victory, was possible.
Some years before the war, the diplomat Lord D’Abernon observed with patrician complacency that “an Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” In May 1940, he might have perceived Churchill as an exemplar.
TWO
The Two Dunkirks
ON MAY 28, Churchill learned that the Belgians had surrendered at dawn. He observed that it was not for him to pass judgement on King Leopold’s decision. He repressed until much later his private bitterness, though this was unjustified when Belgium had no rational prospect of sustaining the fight. Overnight a few thousand British troops had been retrieved from Dunkirk, but Gort was pessimistic about the fate of more than 200,000 who remained, in the face of overwhelming German airpower. “And so here we are back73 on the shores of France on which we landed with such high hearts over eight months ago,” Pownall, Gort’s chief of staff, wrote that day. “I think we were a gallant band who little deserve this ignominious end to our efforts … If our skill be not so great, our courage and endurance are certainly greater than that of the Germans.” The stab of self-knowledge reflected in Pownall’s phrase about the inferior professionalism of the British Army lingered in the hearts of its intelligent soldiers until 1945.
That afternoon at a War Cabinet meeting in Churchill’s room at the Commons, the prime mini
ster again—and for the last time—rejected Halifax’s urgings that the government could obtain better peace terms before France surrendered and British aircraft factories were destroyed. Chamberlain, as ever a waverer, now supported the foreign secretary in urging that Britain should consider “decent terms if such were offered to us.” Churchill said that the odds were a thousand to one against any such Hitlerian generosity, and warned that “nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.” Attlee and Greenwood, the Labour members, endorsed Churchill’s view. This was the last stand of the old appeasers. Privately, they adhered to the view, shared by former prime minister Lloyd George, that sooner or later negotiation with Germany would be essential. As late as June 17, the Swedish ambassador reported Halifax and his junior minister R. A. Butler declaring that no “diehards” would be allowed to stand in the way of peace “on reasonable conditions.”74 It remains extraordinary that some historians have sought to qualify verdicts on the foreign secretary’s behaviour through the summer of 1940. It was not dishonourable—the lofty eminence could never have been that. But it was craven.
Immediately following the May 28 meeting, some twenty-five other ministers—all those who were not members of the War Cabinet—filed into the room, to be briefed by the prime minister. He described the situation at Dunkirk, anticipated the French collapse and expressed his conviction that Britain must fight on. “He was quite magnificent,”75 wrote Hugh Dalton, the minister of economic warfare, “the man, and the only man we have, for this hour … He was determined to prepare public opinion for bad tidings … Attempts to invade us would no doubt be made.” Churchill told the ministers that he had considered the case for negotiating with “that man”—and rejected it. Britain’s position, with its fleet and air force, remained strong. He concluded with a magnificent peroration: “I am convinced 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 at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
