Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  At Christmas, there was always a play in which the Lambs acted for the benefit of guests and staff, Giles once performing the part of a boot-boy in a drama called ‘The Bathroom Door’. Churchill considered it a huge joke when in 1932 Giles hotly defended his adopted creed of Communism. From then on, Giles became ‘the Red Rose’. Yet whatever their political differences, it did not colour their affections. In T. C. Worsley’s autobiographical novel Fellow Travellers, Gavin Blair Summers is based on Giles, ‘a very tough character’ who ‘always defends that old arch-Liberal uncle of his if anyone else attacks him’.46 Giles’s wife Mary was present when the Daily Express got through to Giles after Churchill had had a stroke, and recalls the intensity of his response. She says: ‘Giles turned around. “Something’s happened to Uncle Winston” – and looked shaken. They were a very united family.’

  After Giles went to Spain to train with the International Brigade in Albacete, Nellie predicted that ‘it would kill his father if anything were to happen to him’.47 At the end of her tether, she had turned to Churchill, ‘who was inclined to send a battleship out’, to bring his nephew home; this failing, Churchill had intervened with the International Brigade to keep Giles away from the front.48

  Three years on, the news of Giles’s capture in Narvik – the first British civilian to be taken prisoner by the Germans – was a ‘hideous blow’ to his parents and brother. Beyond the bald detail of his arrest, Nellie had no idea what had happened to ‘Gilo’, as she called her elder and favourite son. Once more she turned to Churchill for assistance, but he was equally in the dark – he did not know if the Norwegians or the Germans had taken Giles. Meanwhile, all that the family had to go on were ‘ghastly stories’ in the German and Italian press ‘of how he had whipped out a revolver & tried to shoot down his captors’.49

  Dramatic as ever, Nellie remembered her own experiences as a POW of the Germans in November 1914. After the evacuation at Mons, she had worked as a nurse in Lady Angela Manners’s ambulance unit when a Prussian officer arrested her, shouting: ‘You shall not return to England and we will make you suffer as you are making our German hospital nurses suffer.’ She was locked in a cell in a large Belgian prison, with one bed, one blanket, and a pewter jug with some brown malt liquid tasting of mud, which she flung through the bars into the garden below. She survived for four days on a potato that was pushed through the bars, and by reading aloud from the Oxford Book of English Verse. On the fifth morning she was released and put on a train to Aachen, the first part of a journey that saw her locked up in waiting rooms in Köln, Osnabruck, Bremen and Hamburg, before she arrived at the Danish town of Vandrup. She remembered a conversation with a German NCO who pointed to an enormous picture of the Kaiser, and sliced his hand across his throat, saying: ‘Of course for him we would all lose our heads.’50 His great joy was to tell Nellie how easily Germany’s four million soldiers would cross the Channel on their conquering march to England, as Hitler now promised to do.

  On learning of Giles’s capture, Nellie wrote to his brother Esmond: ‘I needn’t tell you the hours of agony I have lived through … I was knocked out for 3 days & knew nothing of anything.’ Aside from her own ‘dreadful sorrow and pain’, she worried about the effect on her husband. She held out for three days before informing Bertram.51 He was pierced to the heart.

  The impact on Churchill was less obvious, but behind his posturing he was a family man as much as Chamberlain. Despite his offhand remark to Halifax, Churchill was sensitive to his nephew’s predicament and to its effect on Clementine and her sister. John Colville observed that Churchill’s ‘sympathy for people in distress was immediate, whatever he might have felt about them in the past … Perhaps because his own youth had been unhappy, he went out of his way to be kind to young people.’52 Harold Nicolson’s perception that Churchill was rather ‘sentimental about people’ was nowhere truer than in the case of the elder ‘Lamb’.53 Giles Romilly was an errant son in Churchill’s mould who had spent each Christmas from 1924 to 1933 at Chartwell, once reducing the housemaids to tears with his grand finale of Kipling’s ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!’

  Churchill had quoted Kipling when he inaugurated the Kipling Memorial in November 1937: ‘What stands if Freedom fall? Who dies if England live?’ Three years on, the answer to this ‘supreme question’, which governed Churchill’s life quite as much as it had Kipling’s, seemed personified suddenly by his nephew.54

  Romilly had gone to Narvik to report for the Daily Express on a military action which had been Churchill’s idea. Now the Nazis had captured him in a brilliantly executed operation. The drama of the next four weeks played out against the backdrop of Colonel Bertram Romilly’s struggle to keep alive, and of his son’s uncertain fate.

  Was this to be Britain’s fate too?

  3

  OPERATION ‘WILFRED’

  ‘A lot of nonsense has been written about Norway.’1

  ADMIRAL J. H. GODFREY

  ‘I have read that in the high mountains there are sometimes conditions to be found when an incautious move or even a sudden loud exclamation may start an avalanche.’

  NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN in his first speech as Prime Minister, 25 June 1937

  For the British, the military expedition sent to Norway in response to the German invasion was a spectacular cock-up, with no one quite sure who was in charge in London, and on-the-spot generals and admirals fighting each other in the blizzards of Narvik. Seven months in the preparation, the eight-week campaign became a byword for bungling; a tragedy of bad organisation, missed opportunity and divided command, with interferences by the Admiralty, and with Churchill going behind the backs of the Chiefs of Staff and the War Office, even his own admirals, and in spite of his loyalty to Chamberlain, still playing his own game.

  Churchill had not been to Narvik, nor ever would. It existed for him in the shape of an outsized chart on his wall. Yet this remote trading port became Churchill’s mesmerising obsession during his second short stint at the Admiralty. In that turbulent time, there was a multitude of pressing factors for him to consider. He could never say: ‘For the next three days I shall concentrate on Narvik.’ But if his eye did swivel back to one spot, then it was to this small town at the head of Vestfjorden, 200 miles north of the Arctic circle.

  The initiative to mine Narvik had been Churchill’s. The Scandinavian operation was one of the first conceived and put into action by him after a sizeable period of inactivity. To understand his obsession, Churchill’s fellow Ministers needed to wind back to May 1915 and the humiliation of his forced departure from office after Gallipoli. ‘I can’t help longing for the power to give those wide directions which occupied my Admiralty days,’ Churchill wrote to his wife in January 1916. ‘The damnable mismanagement wh has ruined the Dardanelles enterprise & squandered vainly so much life & opportunity cries aloud for retribution: & if I survive, the day will come when I will claim it publicly.’2 Dogged by the shambles – the senseless bloodshed, the ill-executed naval attack against shore-based targets, the lack of experienced troops – he hankered to eradicate its memory. In the opinion of Halifax’s normally unruffled Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan: ‘This so called Scandinavian “plan” is not a plan: it’s a hang-over.’3

  Churchill initially promoted to the War Cabinet ‘the importance of stopping the Norwegian transport of Swedish ore from Narvik’ a fortnight after his return to the Admiralty in September 1939.4 The First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, had suggested the idea on 18 September, reminding Churchill that the navy had laid a minefield up to the Norwegian three-mile limit in 1918, and had planned to establish a British base near Stavanger. A proposal to use the Royal Navy’s unchallengeable command of the sea to resuscitate this operation – ‘doing Narvik’5 Cadogan called it – would be argued indecisively back and forth, agreed and hesitated over, at innumerable War Cabinet and Supreme War Council meetings in London and Paris until the end of March 1940
.

  In London, the arguments took place at a long rectangular table behind the double doors of the Cabinet Room at No. 10. The War Cabinet of nine was made up of a hard core of Chamberlain, Halifax, Hoare and Simon, supplemented by Lord Chatfield (Minister for the Coordination of Defence until April 1940), and the three forces Ministers – Churchill (Navy), Wood (Air), Hore-Belisha (Army, replaced after January 1940 by Oliver Stanley) – and with Lord Hankey brought back from retirement as Minister without Portfolio. Its morning meetings were often attended for particular items of the agenda by the Chiefs of Staff – Admiral Pound, General Ironside and Air Marshal Sir Cyril Newall – as well as by Major General Hastings Ismay (Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence), Sir John Anderson (Home Secretary), Sir Anthony Eden (Dominions Secretary), Sir Edward Bridges (Cabinet Secretary), Cadogan, and Chamberlain’s special adviser, the senior civil servant Sir Horace Wilson. On the outbreak of war, Chamberlain had invited the Labour leaders to join what was tenuously still called a National government, but they had declined. From January 1940, the Chancellor John Simon, a National Liberal, was the only non-Conservative politician in the War Cabinet.

  Not all these people normally sat around the table, but all did so from time to time. Churchill had to persuade each and every one that a minefield off Narvik would force enemy merchant ships out into the open sea where the navy could legally sink or seize them.

  The Chiefs of Staff were immediately opposed. In General Ironside’s view, it smacked alarmingly of the Gallipoli plan and was likely to accelerate any contemplated German action in Scandinavia. ‘It is like putting a stick inside a hornet’s nest without having provided yourself with a proper veil.’6

  Halifax was opposed, on the grounds that an attack against a neutral country risked alienating other neutrals, as well as American public opinion. The key to a stoppage of ore was surely at Luleå in Sweden, on the Gulf of Bothnia; most convenient for eight months of the year, but usually frozen from January to April, when Narvik took over. Halifax pointed out that there had been no iron-ore traffic from Narvik to Germany since the start of the war; between 3 September and 25 October, not one ship was sent from Germany.

  Chamberlain was opposed because he did not want to provoke Germany into retaliating. Contrary to his posthumous image, he was more alert to the supremacy of the Luftwaffe than Churchill. Chamberlain had written to Churchill on 16 September, saying that he felt the lesson of the Polish campaign was ‘the power of the Air Force when it has obtained complete mastery in the air to paralyse the operations of land forces … and as a result, it seems to me to be above all things vital that we should not allow ourselves to get into the same position vis à vis Germany as the unfortunate Poles.’7

  The arguments over appeasement and the country’s unpreparedness for war scarcely need to be recapitulated. What is worth repeating is that Chamberlain’s obsession with a German bombardment of London was shared by the majority of his War Cabinet. Chamberlain feared that a violation of Norwegian neutrality risked bringing about that knock-out bolt from the blue – from ‘900 bombers at Mannheim ready to take off immediately’ – which his planners had predicted might result in one million casualties in the first week, ‘with the possible destruction of our means of communication’.fn1 8

  In any case, Chamberlain was convinced that his economic blockade of German ports by the Royal Navy was working, and that Hitler’s strange silence was explained by his ‘abject depression’.9 He wrote to his sister Ida on 8 October: ‘However much the Nazis may brag and threaten, I don’t believe they feel sufficiently confident to venture on the great war unless they are forced into it by action on our part. It is my aim to see that that action is not taken.’10

  Churchill took precisely the opposite view. ‘Winston, of course, is in favour of immediate action,’ wrote Chamberlain’s Junior Private Secretary, John Colville – who shared a large room, adjacent to the Cabinet Room, with Chamberlain’s typist Miss Edith Watson, a spinster in her late fifties, and his Parliamentary Private Secretary (and future Prime Minister) Alec Dunglass.11 For them, as for senior Downing Street staff like Chamberlain’s Principal Private Secretary Sir Arthur Rucker, Churchill was a disturbing presence who ‘needed a diet consisting of the carcases of abortive and wild cat operations’ and whose military enthusiasms had to be treated with extreme caution.12 Unlike their wary Prime Minister, Churchill relished the idea of provoking Germany into reacting. If Hitler did attempt an invasion of Norway, ‘it would give us the opportunity to take what we wanted, and this, with our sea power, we could do’.13

  Mad to start something, not least to prevent the French from controlling British strategy, as they had in the First World War, Churchill’s impatience to tempt Germany ‘into an imprudent action which would open the door for us’ was never balanced by a clear assessment of what he wanted or what form a German reaction might take.14 In spite of the fact that he had flown himself – ‘I can manage a machine with ease in the air, even with high winds’ – and had become Air Minister at what was in effect the beginning of the aerial age, Churchill was still slow to learn the lesson of the impact of air power on naval operations.15 That was perhaps inevitable to some degree, for there was no solid experience upon which to base a judgement. The Fleet Air Arm had gone to the Royal Navy early in 1938 with no history of fighting in the air. Churchill was surrounded by many senior battle-hardened people who were singularly reluctant to accept the revolutionary change which air power had made.

  The Royal Navy was the only major navy with a modern A.A. system. Its exposure to the Luftwaffe in the confined waters of the Norwegian fjords was not yet a risk that troubled Churchill. First, there were at that time no German aircraft within range of Narvik or central Norway. Secondly, Churchill was confident that his ships could defeat air attack, meaning high-level bombing, which was virtually the only method known to major air forces. ‘A modern fleet was unassailable from the air,’ he had informed Ironside two years before. ‘A curtain of fire could be put up which would make it impossible for aeroplanes to come.’16 Admiral Godfrey worked alongside him at the Admiralty, and observed that Churchill was ‘obsessed with the idea that a fleet of ships could provide complete aerial protection with its own A.A. guns’.17 The Norway Campaign would show how out of date were some of Churchill’s most firmly held ideas, and how right Chamberlain had been to express concern.

  Over the next three months, Churchill was the one Cabinet member consistently to press for some drastic offensive action to seize back the initiative from Germany. ‘The search for a naval offensive must be incessant.’18 Once Churchill had presented his case on 19 September, he dug in his heels. ‘And when he digs his heels in,’ the Soviet Ambassador observed in his diary, ‘nobody can budge him.’19

  Churchill’s aims were set out in a memorandum that he circulated to the War Cabinet on 16 December. He had interrupted his proofreading of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples to compose it. ‘If Germany can be cut off from all Swedish ore supplies from now onwards till the end of 1940, a blow will have been struck at her war-making capacity equal to a first class victory in the field or from the air, and without any serious sacrifice of life. It might, indeed, be immediately decisive …’20 Churchill did not accept Halifax’s objections – being himself half-American, Churchill needed no one to tell him how the Americans might react. Besides, what did arguments over neutrality matter when at stake was the ruin of civilisation? The Allies were fighting to re-establish the reign of law and to protect the liberties of small countries. ‘Our defeat would mean an age of barbaric violence, and would be fatal not only to ourselves, but to the independent life of every small country in Europe … Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.’21

  Churchill calculated that the cutting of the iron-ore traffic from Narvik was worth more than all the rest of the blockade, and would shorten the war and save thousands of lives. Plus, President Roosevelt had given the go-ahead. Churchill had asked the American Ambassador
, Joseph Kennedy, to canvass the President’s opinion. Roosevelt had sent back a coded message: ‘My wife doesn’t express an opinion.’ If he had objected, the message would have read: ‘Eunice had better not go to the party.’22

  But in January – ‘much to the disgust of Winston’, according to Ironside – the Cabinet decided ‘to turn down Narvik’.23 A deciding factor was the objection of the Norwegian King. Haakon VII had issued an appeal to George VI, his nephew, who used his influence on the Foreign Secretary. Halifax ‘now convinced that W. S. C. on wrong track,’ Cadogan wrote on 11 January. ‘Heard later P.M. shares his view. Fear this will produce something like a Cabinet split.’24

  Halifax sent an emollient letter to Churchill two days later. ‘I have felt very unhappy at finding myself taking a different line to you on the Narvik project: not only because I realise all the force of the argument you deployed, and appreciate how disastrous it may be to refrain from positive action in such a struggle as this, but also because I have too great a respect for you and for all that you bring to this business of saving civilisation to feel other than uncomfortable when my mind does not go with yours.’25

  Churchill believed that the mining of Narvik amounted to no more than a ‘technical infringement’ and that the Cabinet should not let itself be bound by judicial scruples which their enemies had thrown to the winds.26 Never still, his need to act consumed him. Admiral Godfrey had close contact with Churchill up to May 1940. In his unpublished ‘worm’s eye view’, Godfrey wrote that if the First Lord had a bright idea, ‘he wanted to do something about it straight away’, and, to get his own way, ‘brought the whole battery of his ingenious, tireless and highly political mind to bear on the point at issue. His battery of weapons included persuasion, real or simulated anger, mockery, vituperation, tantrums, ridicule, derision, abuse and tears, which he would aim at anyone who opposed him.’27, 28