by Simon Schama
This extraordinary instrument of mobilizing allegiance did not work by itself. It took Churchill between six and eight hours to get each speech right, and he would rehearse them relentlessly until he felt he had each line perfectly weighed and timed. It was as important for him, as for any great thespian, to pace himself between reassuring gentleness (of which there is much more than meets the eye in reading the printed text) and heroic apostrophe. In the performance of ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’, done for both parliament and the BBC, the reiterated mantra of defiance is actually spoken very softly, almost ecclesiastically, with the resignation of someone who knows he is merely stating the obvious. ‘We shall fight them in the hills’ thus becomes not a summons but simply a statement of confident fact.
This was, of course, to pay Britons – many of whom were undoubtedly not looking forward to fighting either on the hills or on the beaches – an enormous compliment. But then Churchill was full of compliments for the people whom in 1940, whether they were waving at him from the smouldering rubble of their cities, exiting from the cockpit of a Hurricane, or just standing around a village green with an ancient shotgun, he transparently loved with a rich passion that was decidedly un-British in its intensity and completely foreign to politics. This love wasso powerful that it persuaded him to do something else unheard of in politics, and that was to tell the truth. Not the whole truth, of course (this was not fairyland), but an astonishing measure of it. Most of the five great speeches of 1940 had little good to report except the raw fact of survival, and when, as in the speech made after Dunkirk, there seemed to be something to feel relatively happy about, Churchill was quick to guard against premature self-congratulation. ‘Wars are not won by evacuations,’ he said on 4 June 1940, and took care to enumerate just how much equipment had been left behind in France along with the loss of 30,000 men. Another compliment was being paid to the British people by his not treating them like children in need of the consolations of lying propaganda. By not disguising the gravity of the situation, but without making any concession to defeatism, Churchill won credibility. When he eventually did have good news to report, he could be trusted not to be indulging in idle hopes.
Not least, Churchill and his government gave the British people something to do. In October 1939 he had suggested that a Home Guard of half a million men ought to be formed, to release the armed services from routine sentry and patrol work. The day after the ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech on 14 May, Anthony Eden announced the formation of a Local Defence Volunteer Force (later called the Home Guard) for men between the ages of 15 and 65 (although in practice the upper age limit was not very rigorously adhered to). Within 24 hours, a quarter of a million had come forward. By mid-1943 there were some 1.75 million men in the Home Guard, organized in 1100 battalions. In 1940 they had drilled in bowler hats and cheese-cutter cloth caps, carrying an old fowling gun or a Lee-Enfield left over from the Indian Mutiny; three years later they were more or less uniformed and equipped with usable if not bang up-to-date weapons.
Neither a Home Guard nor speeches were going to win the war by themselves, however. And by the third week of May 1940 it seemed to some of the war cabinet, in particular Chamberlain and Halifax, that nothing was going to win the war. The Maginot Line, the solid line of French defences on their eastern border, had held. The trouble was that the Germans had simply gone round it. The desperate French premier, Paul Reynaud, pleaded with Churchill for more RAF air support since the Germans seemed to be able to fly at will over France, but Churchill, torn between two instincts – to support his European ally, and to think ahead to the defence of his own island – was reluctant to risk Britain’s own, still thin, air defences for a risky proposition on the other side of the Channel. The French, especially General de Gaulle, would always feel that by acting prudentially lest France fall, Churchill and Air Marshal Dowding guaranteed it. The declaration of a ‘union’ between Britain and France, ancestral enemies joined to fight the common foe, was an extraordinary symbolic gesture from Marlborough’s descendant but in the end could be no more than that.
The news kept getting worse. Churchill had asked Franklin Roosevelt to allow a British aircraft carrier into an American port to load planes bought from the United States, but the president declined on the grounds that this would violate his country’s neutrality. For Halifax the destruction of the French army, not so long ago routinely described, not least by Churchill himself, as ‘invincible’, was a harsh education in the new reality. For one thing, it meant that nearly 300,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force, who had been retreating towards one of the last open Channel ports, Dunkirk, looked certain of being cut off. The Netherlands had been over-run. Belgium was on the point of capitulating. The Luftwaffe was thought to have massive numerical superiority over the RAF and the Channel suddenly seemed very narrow. He cast his mind back to his talks with von Ribbentrop in 1937 and to the offer that had come from Berlin to leave Britain and its empire, both of them admired so much by Hitler, alone in return for a free hand in the east. Suppose now that that offer, or something like it, was still on the table, this time in return for accepting the status quo in western Europe and whatever it was that the Germans wanted to do in those ‘far away’ countries? The key was Italy, until then not at war with Britain or France. Halifax believed it might be possible for a joint Anglo-French exploratory approach to be made through Mussolini, to see what terms might be available for the preservation of British independence. He fully expected Churchill to reject such an approach, but then Halifax knew that, even if his speeches sometmes pulled the wool over simple people’s eyes, they didn’t fool the people who mattered, who knew just how desperate the situation was: the military men, the civil servants, his reliables among the Conservatives who still sniggered when they heard Winston do yet another impersonation of Henry V before Agincourt. Churchill, Halifax told a friend rather grandly, was talking ‘the most frightful rot’ and he didn’t know how long he could continue working with him. But this was, perhaps, Britain’s last chance of salvaging something from the disaster, of pre-empting a catastrophic invasion. In June, Halifax went home to the Vale of York, looked at the glory of the countryside and made up his mind that the ‘Prussian jackboot’ would not be allowed to desecrate it. If that meant an exit from the unwinnable war, so be it.
Halifax’s epiphany in the Vale of York was part of the cult of the English countryside that had become something of a fetish in the 1930s. The legions of the right-minded and the wellington-booted had closed together to keep out charabancs and pylons, and now they would do the same to keep out the jackbooted Hun. It would stay perfect for ever. History would pass right by the sheep and the lowing herds and the thatched pubs and the millstreams. H.V. Morton’s Miss Cheshire could sleep undisturbed above the ruined dormitory of Beaulieu Abbey. Everything would be all right.
But Churchill knew that if Britain threw in its lot with a defeated France and went cap in hand to Germany, whether through Mussolini or not, everything would not be all right. The truth was that he was not interested in saving the Vale of York, the Weald of Kent or Britain at all in the sense of a mere piece of scenic geography. He would rather see them go up in flames than go down without a fight. Scenery might recover in a year or two; a slave Britain would not. What he was committed to saving was the idea of Britain; an idea, moreover, that was not just airy theory, not just what scholars nowadays are pleased to call a ‘cultural construction’, an invention, but a lived-in human community, and one that he believed had been the great gift of British history to its countless generations, even to the world: a free political society, governed by the rule of law. He may have been simple-minded to believe this. He may have been an incorrigible ‘Whig’ historian to believe this. But he was not mistaken to believe this. That was, indeed, the Britain that would not survive capitulation, however dressed up it might be as a ‘peace’. What was the point of rambling through Yorkshire when British liberties existed by permission of
the Nazi hegemony? What was the point of riding to hounds in a puppet kingdom?
Revisionist historians have wondered, given Britain’s dependence on the United States after 1940 and the accelerated end of empire, whether, since Churchill had claimed so often and so militantly that he wanted to save the empire, he should not have taken whatever deal he could have got in May 1940? But co-existence with Hitler would not have saved the empire, which was falling apart for its own independent and internal reasons. And the subsequent experience of Vichy France hardly suggests that the limited autonomy granted to vassal states would have been respected, especially when it came to the matter of handing over Jews, the great point of it all for Adolf Hitler. This, too, Churchill felt in his marrow: as he said many times, there could be no co-existence with so iniquitous a tyranny.
On 27 May, under increasing pressure, Churchill did waver just a little, to the point of not ruling out any German offer on the basis of accepting the status quo in eastern Europe – presumably meaning a German withdrawal from occupied countries in the west. But this, he said, was unlikely to happen. The following day he had to report that the capitulation of Belgium had put the British force in France in an even more perilous predicament. But when he spoke that afternoon to the five members of his small, inner, war cabinet about Halifax’s suggestion of at least exploring Italian mediation ‘provided we can secure our independence’, Churchill hardened his position. This, he said, was the worst possible time to stop fighting. Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those that surrendered tamely were finished. The Labour members of the war cabinet, Attlee and Greenwood, added that, after everything the prime minister had said about fighting on, backsliding could have catastrophic effects on the morale of working people in the industrial towns who were giving their all for the patriotic cause. Chamberlain was, interestingly, silent.
It was at that moment, in the late afternoon of 28 May, that something momentous happened to change British history. Although it has been described as a Churchillian ‘coup’, it was psychological rather than political. And it was merely the effect of committee protocol. At around five, seeing that the discussion was going neither for nor decisively against him, Churchill adjourned the war-cabinet meeting. The Important People left Number 10, and Churchill, exhausted as he was from arguing the case for defiance, brought as many members of the larger full cabinet as could be found – about 25 – into the room. Not many of the Labour members knew him very well. But the presence of this bigger group suddenly emboldened Churchill, broke the dam of tension, flooded him with a sense that this was a historical turning point and, not least, switched on the golden words. He began with sorrowful candour, as he did in his broadcasts. France would fall; Hitler would be in Paris; and the Italians would offer terms that must at all costs be rejected. Any thought of using the United States, as Halifax had also suggested, to make a ‘grovelling appeal’ was out of the question. According to the Labour politician Hugh Dalton, who had just become minister of economic warfare, Churchill then became ‘magnificent’ and proceeded to deliver a speech of absolutely intractable determination, saying that even if a hundred thousand could get away from Dunkirk it would be ‘wonderful’ and that no one should imagine for a moment that Britain was finished. There were reserves, there was the empire. Then he went on to say that:
I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man. But it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out … The Germans would demand our fleet … 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 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.
With the cabinet doubtless moved by the certainty that the old boy really meant it, Dalton records: ‘There were loud cries of approval all round the table.’ Not much more was said. Before they left, Dalton went and patted Churchill on the back as he stood brooding darkly before the cabinet-room fireplace and said, ‘“Well done, Prime Minister! You ought to get that cartoon of Low, showing us all rolling up our sleeves and falling in behind you, and frame it and stick it up there.” He answered with a broad grin, “Yes, that was a good one, wasn’t it?”’
It was better than good; it was itself the first great battle of the Second World War fought and won, not with Hurricanes and Spitfires but with words, passion, history. Churchill suddenly felt, and he was quite right, that the instinctive reaction of the 25 ministers was the reaction of the nation. When the small war cabinet reconvened at seven o’clock he was in a position to tell them that he had never in his life heard a body of men in high positions express themselves so emphatically. This time neither Chamberlain nor Halifax bothered to contradict him. For some reason, in his memoirs Churchill – perhaps out of generosity – preferred to conceal what had really happened in the war cabinet, preferring to write of a ‘white glow, overpowering, sublime, which ran through our Island from end to end’. This was, to put it mildly, an optimistic view. But it is true that after 28 May 1940, a date that every school student ought to know as one of the great dates in the nation’s history, and after the great ‘we shall never surrender’ speech to the nation, there was no longer any prospect of a British Vichy. British Jews would not be rounded up at Wembley and shipped to Auschwitz. To some of us, this is not a trivial thing.
Having behaved honourably and bravely, Churchill received a reward so miraculous he could hardly believe it himself. Instead of the 50,000 that the government thought might survive Dunkirk, 330,000 soldiers had been rescued, 200,000 of them British and in a flotilla of over 800 boats, the likes of which, it is safe to say, had never been seen in a major war before: round-the-harbour pleasure boats, shrimpers and fishing smacks; ferries and tugs; anything that would float. Some, like the Gracie Fields, dive-bombed by Stukas, paid the price. But it was the clearest evidence imaginable that, in the worst possible circumstances, the country that Baldwin had described as a ‘pacific democracy’ (and in 1935 he had not been wrong) had what it took to become a true national community once more.
In the year that followed there would be overwhelming evidence of this new-found cohesiveness and mutual loyalty. The complete isolation of Britain, fighting on alone, which Hitler not unreasonably assumed would make it a soft target, had precisely the reverse effect. Churchill turned on the ‘island nation’ rhetoric and the British people across all classes, with very few exceptions, echoed him. This did not, of course, mean that there was not bitterness and alienation among the nearest and dearest of those who lost any one of the 60,000 civilians killed in the war, or the 300,000 combat troops (half the number killed in the First World War), or the millions who had been made homeless by the destruction of the Blitz or the Vl and V2 rockets at the end of the war. Nor did all social divisions dissolve into a brew of patriotic cheerfulness. The first time that the king and queen visited Stepney, according to Harold Nicolson, they were booed, which is precisely why, after Buckingham Palace had taken its first hit on 14 September, it meant so much for Queen Elizabeth to be able to ‘look the East Enders in the face’.
With all these reservations it is still impossible not to be struck by the degree to which Britain, which had been such a divided society between the wars, managed to pull together when it mattered most. It was one thing for a people accustomed to doing what they were told to accept rationing as a matter of course; but it was another for the unions and employers, so bitterly at odds for so long, to work together for the nation in arms. It helped, of course, to have Bevin and Beaverbrook (the latter in charge of aircraft production) in the same government, a tandem that could hardly have worked at any other time, and that Herbert Morrison w
as in the critical role of minister of supply. But no undue pressure needed to be applied to have factories, many of them, of course, staffed by women, working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The collaborative push made a critical difference to the production of munitions in general, but especially of war planes, which in turn made the difference between winning and losing the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940. Misled by overestimates of their numerical superiority, Goering’s Luftwaffe kept on writing the RAF’s obituary – only to have Spitfires and Hurricanes rise from the ashes to mock their mistaken confidence.
The ‘few’ weren’t, in fact, all that few at all. In mid-August, when the Battle of Britain began to be intense, the RAF actually had 1032 fighter planes to the Luftwaffe’s 1011. Even by the end of the first week of September, when the Germans thought they had disposed of all but a hundred or so fighters, the RAF had 736 available with another 256 waiting to be made operational. The Germans also suffered from other disadvantages. Plane for plane, there was nothing in the Luftwaffe that could beat the eight-gun British Spitfire for speed, manoeuvrability and concentrated firepower, at least at 20,000 feet and below. (Richard Overy argues that if the Battle of Britain had been fought at 30,000 feet the British would have lost it.) By having to protect bombers, German fighters lost the tactical flexibility they would have had if they had been allowed to roam freely, and their distance from base meant their operational time was severely limited. Although it was not always accurate, and not much use inland, radar – together with the 30,000 men and women who manned the Observer Corps – gave early warning of the raids. Wrecked or damaged aircraft that fell on British soil could be recovered and rebuilt. British pilots who bailed out could be back in the air the same day; German pilots and crew were quickly captured. The country responded in its own way to the exceptional sacrifices that the airmen were making: ground staff serviced planes round the clock, whilst civilians contributed to Spitfire Funds, voluntary donations that ran at about £1 million a month in 1940, to build more planes. By the autumn almost every town in Britain could claim its own sponsored Spitfire. When Lord Beaverbrook called for the donation of aluminium pots and pans to be melted down and reconstituted as aircraft parts, the kitchens of Britain emptied.
