In adopting the strategic defensive, the French high command was expressing the caution of a France whose World War I wounds were still unhealed. All the great battles had been fought on French or Belgian soil, and 1,315,000 poilus (“hairy,” “virile”) had been killed in action—27 percent of all men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven, a figure that does not include the wounded: those left blind, or legless, or armless, or with no limbs at all. The survivors lacked the strength or the will to lift the tricolor again. Unlike generations of Frenchmen gone before them, they understandably felt no craving for grandeur, no desire for Gallic supremacy in Europe. They did not want to lose this war, but neither did they much crave victory. In fact, they did not even want victory. France had no war aims. Everything desirable, as they saw it, was already French. They asked for nothing from the Germans but peace.
Thus the decision to leave the initiative to the Nazis was more political than military. Le Maginot was as much a state of mind as a fortified line; when Daladier’s government fell that March, conduct of the war was entrusted to Paul Reynaud only after he promised to undertake no offensive against the enemy. The idea of attacking Germany was, the deputies agreed, preposterous. After the Polish collapse, the most bellicose had lost heart. In the Chambre des Députés, all political parties became defeatist. Even before Hitler could deliver another Friedensrede, a peace speech calling on the Western allies to end the war now that he had enslaved another country—he had been posing as a prince of peace for seven years—the Communist delegation in the Chambre demanded that the deputies debate the “proposals for peace which are going to be made.” Alexis Léger, the secretary-general of the Foreign Office, told the American ambassador William Bullitt: “The game is lost. France stands alone against the three dictatorships. Great Britain is not ready. The United States has not even changed the neutrality act. The democracies are again too late.” Alfred Sauvy concluded simply that the country had “refused the war” (“on refusait la guerre”).86
But this was not a chess match, where a gambit could be refused. And Hitler would deliver no proposals of peace on the upcoming weekend of May 10. He intended to deliver something else entirely.
The timidity of the French high command had exasperated Churchill ever since the war’s outbreak. They had rejected every initiative suggested by him—bombing the Ruhr, for example, or mining the Rhine—on the grounds that it might invite Nazi reprisals. “This idea of not irritating the enemy,” he later wrote, “did not commend itself to me…. Good, decent, civilized people, it appeared, must never themselves strike until after they have been struck dead.” This Gallic trepidation even ruled out air reconnaissance, which defies understanding because the Luftwaffe was overflying French lines every day. Had Allied planes done the same in early May, they would have been astonished at enemy preparations below. Eight military bridges had been thrown across the Rhine, and three armored columns stretched back from the river for one hundred miles.87
In fact, one French pilot did see the buildup on the evening of the eighth of May. He was over the Ruhr, returning from a propaganda mission, dropping leaflets urging the German people to overthrow Hitler and thus bring peace. Above Düsseldorf he looked down and saw a sixty-mile line of tanks and trucks headed for the Ardennes. They were driving with their lights on. He reported his discovery. It was dismissed as not credible.
This was not the first time such intelligence had been dismissed, but it would be the last. Five months earlier, as Europe slept away the winter, a German airplane carrying two staff officers was blown off course and forced to land in Belgium. The officers tried, and failed, to burn the papers they carried, which happened to contain OKW’s revised operation orders for the invasion of the Low Countries, including a thrust through the Ardennes. British intelligence perused the captured papers. The high arts of deception and double-cross being well practiced by both the Germans and the British, it was concluded that the papers were a plant, a ruse, and therefore, unbelievable.88
On Thursday morning, May 9, the 250th day of the war, Chamberlain faced the bitter truth: he was through. The debacle in Norway had finished him. It had become obvious that Britain needed an all-party national government, and Labour refused to serve under him. Given the huge Tory majority in the House, a legacy of the general election of 1935, the new prime minister would have to be a Conservative. The party’s leadership wanted Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary. So did Chamberlain. So did the King. However, Tory backbenchers and Labour MPs leaned toward the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Halifax bowed out. Telephoning London from his battalion, Randolph Churchill asked for news. His father told him: “I think I shall be Prime Minister tomorrow.”89
At 9:00 P.M. that night Hitler issued the code word “Danzig.”
The mightiest army in history was ready, and at 4:19 A.M. on Friday, May 10, 1940, more than two million German soldiers in coalscuttle helmets surged forward. The Wehrmacht was crossing the frontiers of Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg, attacking on a front extending from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier. Hitler had repeatedly sworn never to violate their neutrality, but he meant to conquer France, and the Low Countries were in his way.90
At 5:30 A.M. Belgium asked the Allies for help. Gamelin phoned General Alphonse Georges, his field commander in the northeast.
Georges asked: “Well, General, is it the Dyle operation?”
Gamelin said: “Since the Belgians are calling on us, do you see what else we can do?” (“Que nous puissons faire autre chose?”) Georges replied: “Obviously not.”
Gamelin sealed it: “We must go into Belgium!” (“Nous devons entrer en Belgique”). Five minutes later Georges ordered five French armies and the British Expeditionary Force across the frontier. There was some unpleasantness with the Belgian border guards, who hadn’t been told of the decision in Brussels. One official demanded visas from the British 3rd Division—the divisional commander, Major General Bernard Montgomery, put him under arrest—and on several roads Belgian obstacles, erected to block a French invasion, still barred the way. None slowed the Allied troops, now plunging ahead.91
The BEF was in high spirits. Tommies blew kisses as they passed smiling women and, wrote Clare Boothe, who was there, “stuck up their thumbs in the new gesture they had, which meant ‘O.K., everything’s fine.’ ” They were singing “Roll Out the Barrel,” a Czech drinking song that had been popular since Munich, nineteen months earlier, and a ballad based on an Australian folk song:
Run, Adolf, run Adolf, run, run, run!
Here comes a Tommy with his gun, gun, gun!
They also sang songs their fathers had sung a generation ago: “Tipperary,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” and “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag.” Among older officers there was a remarkable mood of déjà vu. In the New York Times, Drew Middleton wrote: “It was almost as if they were retracing steps taken in a dream, they saw again faces of friends long dead and heard the half-remembered names of towns and villages.”92
By evening the best trained of the Allied troops were deep in both Belgium and Holland. Here, Gamelin assured everyone, was the German schwerpunkt—the strategic center of effort as defined by Prussian staff doctrine.
His blunder was fatal.
At Hitler’s eyrie at Bad Münstereifel, twenty-five miles southwest of Bonn, the Führer danced with joy. His generals could scarcely believe their luck. General Adolf Heusinger excitedly scrawled in his diary: “They have poured into Belgium and fallen into the trap!”93
The upcoming Sabbath was Whitsuntide, traditionally part of a long holiday weekend for Englishmen, and celebrated by Christians as the day the Holy Spirit descended upon Christ’s disciples. Londoners were impressed when, on Friday, having learned of the attack upon the Low Countries, their government canceled the bank holiday; it meant, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes for The New Yorker, “The government is really getting a move on.” No reliable news was coming out of the Low Countries, and that was
bad. Yet Britons were calm; no excited crowds took to the streets. Panter-Downes wrote: “It takes a good, stiff dose of adversity to release the formidable strength in what Harold Nicolson called ‘the slow grinding will power of the British people.’ To that has been added the quickening realization that they are fighting for their lives.”94
For almost a decade Churchill had drummed warnings to his countrymen that this day would come. Three hundred years earlier, during the English Civil War, both the Royalist and Parliamentary armies introduced drummers into their ranks. They went into battle unarmed and beat out coded orders that could be heard over the crash of muskets and cannon: form up, face right, left, volley. The drummers were not meant to inspire or comfort their comrades, or to introduce confusion and fear into enemy ranks, yet within the blinding stinking smoke and bloody mayhem of combat, their relentless, rhythmic, tap and thrum did just that. Where the drummers of England went, Empire followed. Rudyard Kipling glorified them in “The Drums of the Fore and Aft,” in which the courage of two young regimental drummers inspires the regiment, which, on the verge of annihilation at the hands of Afghan tribesmen, regroups, attacks, and at the end of the slaughter claims victory.
Churchill’s heroes—Pitt, Marlborough, Nelson—had not only led, they had inspired. Winston Churchill was prepared now to step forward as England’s master and commander, and its drummer. But were his King and countrymen ready for him? Would Britons join him when the Hun arrived, and fight alongside him to the end? Were they prepared, each and all, to die in defense of family, home, King, and country? Churchill was. He had readied himself for this moment during every hour of every day for six decades, when he first sent his toy armies charging across the floors of his father’s London town house.
The glorious weather held. Lilacs—in English folklore the harbingers of springtime rebirth—bloomed across the land. “Lovely day,” Alexander Cadogan noted in his diary hours before Hitler gave his order to attack. “Tulips almost at their best and everything smiling, except human affairs.”
Cadogan, a Chamberlain loyalist, by then knew that the Chamberlain government was finished. “But what,” he asked his diary, “are we going to put in its place?” Who would lead? “Attlee? Sinclair? Sam Hoare?”
He eliminated one candidate out of hand: “Winston useless.”95
1
Cyclone
MAY–DECEMBER 1940
Shortly after tea on Friday, May 10, fifteen hours after Hitler drove his steel into the Low Countries, Neville Chamberlain reluctantly returned the seals of his office to King George VI, who received them with equal reluctance: “I accepted his resignation,” the sovereign wrote in his diary that evening, “& told him how grossly, unfairly I thought he had been treated.” Shortly after six o’clock, the King anointed as prime minister the massive, stooped, sixty-five-year-old first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. Later King George became one of Churchill’s most ardent admirers, but his feelings were mixed at the time. In his diary that day Jock Colville wrote that the King “(remembering perhaps the abdication, which Churchill had opposed) is understood not to wish to send for Winston.” Nevertheless, an all-party government was essential, and Labour had been adamant: they would not serve under Chamberlain.1
Defending Britain and her Empire would be the new prime minister’s responsibility for the next five years, or until he was hurled from office by Parliament or Hitler. Yet, as he rode back from Buckingham Palace, neither he nor anyone else in London felt unduly alarmed over the course of the war. Little was known that evening about the day’s developments across the Channel. The Luftwaffe had bombed airfields in Belgium and Holland; parachute troops had landed among the Belgians, who were said to be fighting well; Dutch resistance was reportedly “stubborn”; and the Allies were taking up strong positions on the Antwerp-Namur Line, preparing to defend the Albert Kanaal. Everything was going as expected, or so it seemed at that hour.2
When the BBC announced Churchill’s appointment that night, his daughter Mary, seventeen, listened to the broadcast in the small cottage at Chartwell where her governess lived. When it finished she switched off the wireless and said a prayer for her father.3
Churchill was surrounded by his family, whether at No. 10 or in the underground Annexe. Of the older Churchill children, only Sarah, the actress, was still a civilian, living with her husband in a Westminster Gardens flat, and soon she too would be commissioned in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Sarah’s husband, Vic Oliver, Austrian by birth, the son of Baron Viktor Oliver von Samek, had renounced his barony, changed the “k” in Viktor to “c,” and was now an American citizen. Churchill, upon first meeting Oliver in 1936, took an immediate dislike to the man, and in a letter to Clementine cut loose. Oliver was “common as dirt,” possessed “a horrible mouth,” and spoke with “an Austro-Yankee drawl.” Yet no mention was made of the one trait which many in the English aristocracy would have found sufficient to dismiss Vic Oliver outright: his family was Jewish. It would not have occurred to Churchill to do so. He measured the man.4
Of the other children, Diana and Randolph were already officers, she in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, or Wrens in naval slang), Randolph in his father’s old regiment, the 4th Hussars. Mary worked in a canteen and for the Red Cross and lived with her parents. So did Randolph’s twenty-year-old wife, Pamela, who was expecting their first child in October. When the air raids began with June’s full moon, Pamela and her father-in-law shared bunk beds in the basement of No. 10. Because she was pregnant, hers was the bottom bunk, and in the early hours of each morning she woke to hear Churchill laboriously climb the short ladder to his. Clementine slept in another basement bedroom.5
As prime minister, Churchill was also surrounded by a large official family, “The Secret Circle,” as he called them. Always at his elbow were his three private secretaries, John (“Jock”) Colville, who remained at No. 10 after Chamberlain’s departure, and Eric Seal and John Martin, whom Churchill had brought over from the Admiralty. Also within earshot were his typists, Kathleen Hill, Grace Hamblin, and Edith Watson, who had aided every P.M. since Lloyd George. Pug Ismay served as his liaison with His Majesty’s Chiefs of Staff, whose offices were in Richmond Terrace: the chiefs were Admiral Sir Alfred Dudley Pound, General Sir John Dill, and Air Marshal Sir Cyril Newall. Colville told his diary that Churchill considered the three chiefs to be “sound, but old and slow.” Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal replaced Newall in October.6
A recent arrival at No. 10 was Dr. Charles Wilson, the P.M.’s personal physician, who kept a diary from the day of his appointment. On first meeting the doctor, Churchill treated him as he did all underlings, with a mixture of curtness and impatience. Dr. Wilson had found Churchill in bed, at noon, reading papers, which he continued to peruse as Wilson stood nearby, waiting for some acknowledgment. Finally, from Churchill: “I don’t know why they’re making such a fuss.” Churchill snarled, “There’s nothing wrong with me.” That was true enough, for the doctor makes no further diary entries for the remainder of the year.7
Churchill hadn’t wanted a doctor; he claimed that there was nothing wrong with him. Churchill’s old friend Max Beaverbrook insisted, however, and no one could insist more strenuously than “the Beaver,” as everyone called him. That was why Churchill had named him chief of aircraft production. England had to have planes for the coming air battle. In pursuit of a vital goal, the Beaver was ruthless, unscrupulous, even piratical. He seized factories, broke into warehouses, and imprisoned those who tried to stop him. None of this was against the law. On May 22, Parliament had passed an Emergency Powers (Defence) Act giving His Majesty’s Government sweeping prerogatives. One section, 18B, effectively removed the habeas from habeas corpus. HMG held absolute power over all British citizens, requiring them “to place themselves, their services, and their property at the disposal of His Majesty,” specifically of the minister of defence, who happened also to be the prime minister. Churchill could hav
e become a dictator had he so chosen. Instead he became almost obsessive in his belief that the House should be fully informed of all developments.8
Among the other newcomers to HMG were three Churchill votaries—“the fearsome triumvirate,” Colville called them—whom the civil servants had awaited with dread: Brendan Bracken, MP; Frederick Lindemann (“the Prof”); and Major Desmond Morton, a Westerham neighbor of Churchill who had played a vital role in Churchill’s prewar intelligence net, assembling proof of England’s military unpreparedness. But Morton lacked access to the most vital intelligence, from Bletchley. Within a year Morton’s star began to set, since Churchill, informed by Bletchley, no longer needed his own private secret service, and Morton apparently did not provide enough panache at the dinner table to rate a regular weekend dinner invitation. Churchill’s friendships admitted to a certain degree of utilitarian relativity, though for the time being Morton’s past loyalty trumped his diminishing utility. Bracken had long been Churchill’s most devout supporter in the House of Commons. He was also a very odd young man who, to Clementine’s annoyance, had in the 1920s encouraged rumors that he was Churchill’s natural son (he ceased doing so at Churchill’s request). The Prof was even odder. German born, educated at Berlin University, a bachelor and vegetarian, he believed that all women looked upon him as a sex object. But he was a brilliant physicist and a consummate interpreter of science for laymen. He was to become the strongest advocate for the unrestricted bombing and burning of the cities of his homeland.9
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