Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  9

  THE WINSTON IMPASSE

  ‘He was all for instant recognition: he wanted the people to throw up their sweaty nightcaps and shout “Vive Winston!”’1

  STANLEY BALDWIN to NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, October 1940

  ‘An ill fate … followed every step of the project.’2

  PHILIP JOUBERT DE LA FERTé, planner for the operation to retake Trondheim

  The Dardanelles, Jutland, the Peninsula, 1066. Churchill was sensitive to historical analogies. Cork’s failure to capture Narvik on the anniversary of Churchill’s most humiliating defeat hit hard in the wake of the cancellation of ‘Hammer’. It also coincided with another anniversary: the seizure of the German submarine pens at Zeebrugge on St George’s Day, 1918.

  Churchill had barely received Cork’s disappointing message when he was given further cause to brood on the historic battle of Zeebrugge.

  The ‘hero of Zeebrugge’ was the Conservative MP for Portsmouth, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes – put back on the active list by Churchill two months earlier, in February, and described as someone not ‘overburdened with a sense of proceeding through the normal channels’.3 When rumours reached Keyes of a prospective naval attack on Trondheim, the sixty-seven-year-old Admiral had sought a meeting with Churchill. Once upon a time, he had hastened to London to plead personally with Kitchener for permission to attack the Dardanelles. On 16 April, he turned up at the Admiralty to press a case for broaching Trondheimsfjorden.

  If ever there was a person to outstrip Churchill in his desire for ‘immediate offensive action’ of the boldest possible nature, then it was Roger Keyes.4 In Operation ‘Workshop’, a plan that he prepared eight months later to seize the rocky Italian islet of Pantelleria, Keyes intended to crouch in the first assault boat, and when it was pointed out to him that he would be killed instantaneously, he replied: ‘What better way to die!’ In the words of his loyal wife Eva, he had a ‘genius for making war’.5, 6 As a lieutenant in China, Keyes had captured a fort which Russian and German generals judged too dangerous to attack. In the Boxer Rebellion, his short, compact figure had been the first to squeeze through the narrow sluice gate into the British Legation after he had scaled Peking’s thirty-foot perimeter wall ‘with his Union Jack in his teeth’.7 And on 23 April 1918, he had planned and led the Zeebrugge raid, blocking German shipping and submarines inside the Belgian ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend, an action which Churchill ranked ‘as the finest feat of arms in the Great War, and certainly as an episode unsurpassed in the history of the Royal Navy’.8

  In Churchill’s sentimental estimation, Keyes seemed ‘to revive in our own generation the vivid personality and unconquerable spirit of Nelson’.9 On the day after Churchill returned to the Admiralty in September 1939, he promised the heroic veteran, or so Keyes had understood, ‘that as soon as he has looked round he will find a “mission” for me, so I live in hope … I have faith in my Star.’10

  Keyes interpreted the attack on Trondheim in this providential light. He had heard rumours of difficulties, but, not permitted to know any details, he submitted a plan of his own, which involved using superannuated battleships and other ‘oddments’ to ‘smash up the Norwegian ports’.11, 12 Such an attack, Keyes believed, was divinely crafted for his talents, and he begged to be allowed to lead the mission. ‘Some of the great Sea-Captains of old, who were left unemployed for many years, emerged while older even than I am, and struck a resounding blow at sea, and so would I.’13

  The interview with Churchill on 16 April failed to satisfy Keyes. Immediately it was over, Keyes despatched an indignant letter to his wife. ‘He rang the bell half way through and said he was sorry he was tired and must rest,’ and ‘tried to dismiss me like an importunate beggar.’14

  Keyes sent Churchill another letter the next day, one of a salvo of fourteen marked ‘secret and personal’ that landed on the First Lord’s desk during this period. ‘Let me organise it … Pity we can’t be ready on St George’s Day.15 Why not? … It can’t and won’t fail if you let me do it, and be responsible for it. Back my good fortune … Our stars are linked.’ He appealed to his exploits at Zeebrugge, to their joint support for the Dardanelles campaign. ‘I know I represent the fighting spirit of the Navy.16 If my advice had been followed in 1915, when I fought almost single-handedly to be allowed to force the Dardanelles (which is now accepted as having been a feasible operation) the flower of the Turkish Army would have been cut off and decisively defeated, and we would have been spared the Palestine, Salonika and Mesopotamia campaigns … Give me the small force I asked for and the Royal Navy and its Sea Soldiers will show the world that they can stand up to any German air attack.’ The operation that Keyes had in mind was ‘a combination of Wolfe and Saunders in the St Lawrence; of what might have been done in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli … it runs through the books you inspired me to write, but can never have had time to read, or you would not have hesitated to listen to me.’17

  Churchill was in a difficult position. He had come to share Keyes’s enthusiasm for a naval assault on Trondheim, and he had circulated Keyes’s plans ‘to hammer a way’ into Trondheim harbour with R-class battleships.18 But as he wrote to his ‘very devoted’ friend, ‘I have to be guided by my responsible Naval advisers,’ most of whom, like Dudley Pound, confessed to a history of impatience in their dealings with the Admiral.19, 20 When Churchill was forced to turn Keyes down, using the excuse that he was too old, Keyes’s wife responded with ferocity.

  On 23 April, the anniversary of the Zeebrugge raid, Eva Keyes wrote a private letter to Churchill admonishing him for his treatment of ‘the universally recognised best man for the job of winning the war’.21 In the First World War, Clementine had gone behind her husband to the then Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, writing him, he said, ‘the letter of a maniac’, in which she acknowledged that Churchill had his faults, ‘but he has the supreme quality which I venture to say very few of your present or future Cabinet possesses – the power, the imagination, the deadliness to fight Germany’.22, 23 Eva now wrote to Churchill, defending Keyes in the same chastising terms. ‘It was a nasty shock for him to be told by you that he was too old for a command! although you did not consider Lord Cork too old for one.’24 She said of her husband, in words probably dictated by him: ‘He has more ideas of war in his little finger than the whole Admiralty Staff put together, and he would not have let you be caught napping as you were in Norway – even if the Navy has saved the situation for you since.’ Her husband, Eva went on, had not simply ‘saved your reputation over the Dardanelles’. He had done a colossal amount more to salvage Churchill’s standing. ‘I wonder if you realise how much you owe your present position to him? … for years, when many people were against you, he has been going round the country and in the House of Commons singing your praises … Many people told him that you were not to be trusted, that you were only out for yourself, but he assured them that they did not know you as he did, and he converted many. I begin to wonder if they were not right after all?’

  It was only when Churchill repudiated him a second time, on 25 April, that Keyes learned from his former staff officer Pound, known to Keyes as ‘Do-Nothing Dudley’, that the proposed naval attack on Trondheim had been set aside as too risky – a whole week earlier.25

  On receiving this news, Keyes became, according to Alec Dunglass, ‘so excited as to be almost incoherent, and apparently heading for a brainstorm’.26 Keyes fumed that Carton de Wiart, the army and the navy had been ‘damnably’ let down by the ‘inexplicable ineptitude’ of the Admiralty, whose refusal to attack Trondheim was ‘deplorably pusillanimous and short-sighted’.27 He wrote to Churchill: ‘Steinkjer will stink in the nostrils of the Navy until this disgrace is wiped out,’ and in a separate letter urged Churchill not to delay: ‘The Military situation is extremely critical and needs a bold stroke to save it.’28, 29 Then in his twelfth letter, Keyes gave an ominous warning. ‘If the scuttle is persisted in the Government will have to go and
I shall do my damnedest to speed them.’30 Leo Amery visited Keyes on the morning of 29 April, and he heard him rage that Churchill had been ‘the chief author of the scuttle, over-riding the Sea Lords, as well as the WO’.31 His blood up, Keyes made this promise to his wife. ‘I don’t think he will ever ring his bell to dismiss me again.’32

  On the night of 17 April, when General Hotblack fell down the Duke of York Steps, General Ironside dined with Churchill at the Admiralty. Ironside reflected of his host: ‘He was very human’ – as though it were Churchill who had taken the tumble.33 Ironside admitted to finding him ‘a curious creature of ups and downs.34 Very difficult to deal with when in his downs.’

  In his ups, Churchill enthralled and inspired. One of his researchers for the History of the English-Speaking Peoples recalled conversations at this time in Churchill’s room about the Norman invasion. ‘I still see the map on the wall, with dispositions of the British Fleet off Norway, and hear the voice of the First Lord as he grasped with his usual insight the strategic position in 1066 … The distant episodes were as close and real as the mighty events on hand.’35

  Yet Churchill in his downs could be impossible, and there was no hiding the darkness or direction of his mood as the situation in Norway spiralled from his control.

  Churchill had not really expected a German attack on Norway, despite going along with preparations for that possibility. Then when it came, he expected a quick victory. He had not achieved this. What he faced instead was an obscure and extraordinarily confusing situation which changed every moment, with people reacting to events that had happened some time before, and with no fast means of knowing the true state of affairs, because of his warships’ radio silence, other than intercepts from southern Norway.

  In this vacuum, only what he could follow with his finger on a map took on importance. When he looked at the charts pinned to the Admiralty wall, he was confronted by no Narvik, no Trondheim, and no good news from Åndalsnes, Namsos or Steinkjer – Peter Fleming had been in touch with the Norwegians at Steinkjer ‘and had reported that they were in very low spirits’.36 Churchill’s nephew Giles was a prisoner of the Nazis, and rumoured to be interned on a small island south of Denmark. Trusted dug-outs like Cork and Carton de Wiart had proved disappointing; and however much the idea appealed to him, he dared not, in the teeth of opposition from his Chiefs of Staff, entrust Roger Keyes with a comparable command. Churchill’s stewardship of the Norway Campaign was once again bringing into question his fitness as a leader. At No. 10, Colville wrote in his diary: ‘The Norwegian Minister in Brussels gloomily prophesies a second Gallipoli in Norway.’37

  In its 1917 investigation into the Gallipoli Campaign, the Dardanelles Commission was struck ‘by the atmosphere of vagueness and want of precision which seems to have characterised the proceedings of the War Council’.38 In the second half of April 1940, the stress on the government’s multi-layered decision-making machinery became intolerable for many similar reasons, and on Churchill in particular.

  On 23 April, Ironside noted that ‘Winston was a bit wild at the Cabinet … railing’.39 At the MCC meeting that day, Colville heard how Churchill was ‘being maddening, declaring that we had failed at Namsos, and making the most unreasonable proposals’.40 It was plain to Colville that ‘his verbosity and recklessness make a great deal of unnecessary work, prevent any real practical planning from being done and generally cause friction’.41 Churchill’s volatile behaviour was also taking its toll on Chamberlain. ‘The P.M. is depressed – more by Winston’s rampages than by the inherent strategical difficulties with which we are confronted in Norway.’42 To Lady Halifax, the Prime Minister looked smaller and smaller each time she saw him, ‘in fact he seems to shrivel before one’s eyes’.43

  Chamberlain confessed to his sister that it had been ‘one of the worst, if not the worst, weeks of the war, and for once I feel really tired’.44 He was having to take a tablet of Someral to sleep his usual five and a half hours, and he admitted to frayed nerves and ‘constant gnawing anxiety’. He credited his exhaustion to Churchill’s ‘most difficult’ attitude, ‘challenging everything the Chfs of Staff suggested and generally behaving like a spoiled & sulky child.45 This was the committee over which he is supposed to preside but which he had got into an almost mutinous position. Next morning he wasn’t much better in Cabinet and I heard from a friend who lunched with him [probably Kingsley Wood] that he had been complaining bitterly of being “thwarted” and not having sufficient powers.’

  The Prime Minister believed strongly that ‘the public must not think there are any differences in the Cabinet’.46 The following day, 24 April, he sent Churchill a handwritten note marked ‘secret’ asking him to come to Downing Street after dinner. ‘I have been thinking over the Scandinavian situation and the rather unsatisfactory position in which it stands.47 I don’t feel that I get your whole mind in Committee and should very much like to discuss it all with you in private.’

  Colville led Churchill into the Prime Minister’s room. The talk did not go well. ‘He is proving a difficult colleague.’48

  Later that evening, Churchill sketched out his concerns in a letter that he appears not to have sent. ‘My dear Neville,’ he began.49 ‘Being anxious to sustain you to the best of my ability, I must warn you that you are approaching a head-on smash in Norway.’ The same finger that Churchill had stabbed at General Mackesy he now raised towards Chamberlain. ‘No one is responsible for the creation & direction of military policy except yourself.’ The MCC Chair which Churchill had accepted with eagerness three weeks before had become a chalice overspilling with poison, and having relinquished it to Chamberlain he was not willing to receive it back ‘without the necessary powers … If you do not feel you can head it, with all your other duties, you will have to delegate your powers to a Deputy who can concert & direct the general movement of our war action.’

  Churchill was making a pitch to be Chamberlain’s deputy.

  Colville understood that if the Prime Minister refused to acquiesce, Churchill threatened to go to the House and say he could take no responsibility for what was happening. And ‘there would then be a first-class political crisis, because the country believes that Winston is the man of action who is winning the war and little realises how ineffective, and indeed harmful, much of his energy is proving itself to be’.50

  Chamberlain remained, as he admitted to Colville, ‘at a loss how to solve the Winston impasse’.51 Meanwhile, Churchill’s restless focus had switched once more, from Narvik back to central Norway where ‘Maurice Force’ and ‘Sickle Force’ were disintegrating. Inspired by Keyes’s call for a bold stroke, Churchill made a final appeal for ‘a revival in some form or other of Hammer’.52 But this was rejected on 26 April. Talk in the War Office was of evacuation, not attack. That evening came further shocking news.

  Peter Fleming was reported dead, killed in a raid on Namsos.

  10

  EVACUATION

  ‘The evacuation of Namsos has been referred to as a disaster like that of the evacuation of Gallipoli.’1

  FIELD MARSHAL LORD BIRDWOOD, House of Lords, 8 May 1940

  ‘Norway was the dullest campaign in which I had taken part.’2

  MAJOR GENERAL CARTON DE WIART

  In Namsos, the non-appearance of the navy had put a stop to any idea of attacking Trondheim. On the evening of 22 April, Birger Evensen drove General Carton de Wiart to a suitable place from which to send a signal for a British destroyer to pass on. At 8.29 p.m., a message transmitted on Fleming’s portable H6a wireless reached the War Office. ‘Steinkjer has been bombed and completely destroyed.3 Our men cannot fight off road owing to deep snow, this does not handicap the enemy who is using snow shoes … if a heavy raid on Trondheim had taken place I might have made a dash for Trondheim but now I clearly cannot do this.’

  Burdened by his lack of equipment, Carton de Wiart saw little point in ‘sitting out like rabbits in the snow’.4 He shared the same rule of attack as his fictional c
ounterpart, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook – ‘Never reinforce failure … In plain English that means: if you see some silly asses getting into a mess, don’t get mixed up with ’em.’5

  The reply from the War Office did not make Carton de Wiart any more optimistic. ‘For political reasons they would be glad if I would maintain my positions.6 I agreed, but said it was about all I could do. They were so relieved that they actually wired me their thanks.’

  On Friday 26 April, Carton de Wiart sent Peter Fleming back to London to establish what was going on. At noon, a Sunderland flew Fleming to Scotland where he was delayed by fog, and he eventually reached London on Sunday morning by chartering a special train from Inverness. He wrote in his diary: ‘Many congratulations at the Station Hotel as I had been reported killed the night before.’7

  Leland Stowe was the unreliable source. A Norwegian soldier had mistaken for Fleming the dead naval officer in the cellar of the bombed Grand Hotel in Namsos, who Fleming had worried was Martin Lindsay. The news was printed in the Daily Sketch beneath the headline ‘AUTHOR KILLED IN NORWAY’. Fleming’s mother reported to Geoffrey Dawson that Peter’s brother Ian ‘had a ghastly time until he found it was not true’.8

  Early on Sunday 28 April, Fleming delivered to the War Office the nine-page report that he had written while on the Sunderland. He then had an interview with Churchill ‘in silk combinations & a cigar’.9 After asking if Churchill minded him lighting a pipe – ‘Yes, I bloody well do!’ – Fleming summarised the situation in Namsos, and enquired on Carton de Wiart’s behalf about ‘future plans’.

  No minutes survive of the meeting. Relieved though Churchill would have been to see ‘dear Peter’ alive, he could not divulge a word to him about the Cabinet’s latest plan – to withdraw from all parts of Norway except Narvik.10 This decision had been reached two days before, following another desk-thump from Ironside. ‘Communications with “Sickle Force” have all gone to hell.11 Somebody will have to go and get the troops out of Åndalsnes before it’s too late.’