Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Lindsay believed that his expeditions across Greenland had owed their success to two factors: ‘the skilful arrangement of the smallest details’, and ‘the efficiency of the equipment’ – since the penalty for an error leading to ‘the breakdown of an article on a journey may be death by cold or hunger.’60

  In Norway, a disregard for details and equipment had risked the lives of British servicemen and their French and Polish allies. Among the returning soldiers on deck were ‘a very high percentage of shock cases … due to unremitting bombing with nobody replying’.61 In this, as in other aspects – ‘vital parts left behind or on wrong boats, no transport, no medical equipment and very little food’ – the planners of ‘Maurice Force’ had demonstrated a negligence that was beyond forgiveness, Lindsay felt.

  Before crossing Greenland on his 1,200-mile sledge journey, Lindsay had visited Smithfield market to be taught how to kill and skin a dog – a lesson that he drew on after he was obliged to shoot his huskies. With the training that he had perfected in the Arctic, Lindsay set about flaying the authorities whose responsibility it had been to transport, equip and protect him.

  On board HMS York, with the battle for Norway as hard to erase from his mind as the mud and ash on his uniform, Lindsay began writing a ‘memorandum’, as he described it, which encapsulated what he and Fleming had witnessed from the moment that they touched down in Namsenfjorden on 14 April.

  A strict radio silence was observed for the next three days as the convoy zigzagged back across the North Sea. It was during this time that MPs and the public were made aware that the expedition to Norway had not been the ‘gallant picnic’ which the press and the Admiralty had led them to believe it would be, but a military catastrophe to rank alongside Gallipoli, Black Week in the Boer War, and the Crimea.62

  On the afternoon of Thursday 2 May, Chamberlain made his first statement about the Norwegian Campaign, breaking the news to a House which for three weeks had been willing to go along with Churchill’s claim that Hitler’s occupation of Norway and Denmark was a blunder. A lobby journalist registered the gigantic shock that was given to the House by the Prime Minister’s announcement of the withdrawal of our Forces from Southern Norway. ‘This was a rushing disappointment after great expectations had been raised.’63

  A member of the government told Ronald Tree that he had ‘never seen the House in such a disgruntled and sullen mood.64 He also said that while our own side were prepared for what was coming, the Socialists were taken entirely by surprise & were stunned.’ Even so, the government was still ‘very shaken’, the Conservative MP Paul Emrys-Evans wrote to Lord Cranborne, ‘and I am told that they actually thought of sending for L[loyd] G[eorge], so they must have been almost in extremis.’65

  Chamberlain struggled manfully to camouflage the defeat. He insisted that the Royal Navy had successfully withdrawn Allied troops from Åndalsnes ‘under the very noses of the German aeroplanes’, and that ‘the balance of advantage’ rested with the Allies.66 His reference to the fact that German naval losses now enabled Britain to reinforce the Mediterranean Fleet was received by his front bench with cheers. A. J. Sylvester listened in disbelief. ‘He might have been announcing a great victory rather than a defeat.’67 Any setback was blamed on fifth columnists and their ‘long-planned, carefully-elaborated treachery’, and ‘almost unarmed’ Norwegian troops. Maisky, seated in the Diplomatic Gallery, gained the impression that ‘Chamberlain is clearly bankrupt’.68

  The Prime Minister ended by asking the House not to discuss the situation, as it risked endangering men’s lives because ‘certain operations are still in progress’, suggesting that the navy was still withdrawing troops from Namsos.fn1 When he concluded his speech, Ed Murrow noted, ‘there was a flat, dead silence’.69 In response to a demand by the Liberal leader Archie Sinclair ‘to have more than one day’s Debate’ on the failure of the expedition, Chamberlain promised a full statement on the following Tuesday by both himself and the First Lord, with an extra day if necessary.

  That night, a despairing Harry Crookshank, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, wrote in his diary: ‘What a Govt.70 What a P.M. They must go soon.’

  Outside the House of Commons, the shock to a hitherto tolerant population was dramatic. Up until this moment, the news that things had not gone well had failed to spill out, despite a deep thirst for information. ‘The campaign in Norway is our main interest,’ Frances Partridge admitted.71 ‘While these sensational events are happening, all other interests are submerged in intense painful excitement.’ Yet as A. J. Sylvester noted in his diary, ‘on the pretext of not giving information to the enemy (about things on which he is obviously well informed)’, the government had shown ‘a curious lack of touch with public opinion’.72

  In the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy, the great lid of secrecy and silence had meant that it had been impossible for Margery Allingham to obtain a clear picture. Petrol rationing limited travel. Practically no one used the telephone. Instead, everyone absorbed in the drama of Norway had to follow it, either by listening to BBC bulletins – it was at this time that ‘the tremendous importance of the wireless to us ordinary country people first became so very obvious’ – or else by reading newspapers that were censored and drastically reduced in size: the Observer soon shrank to eight pages after the German invasion cut off Norwegian newsprint.73

  The most alarming aspect to Allingham was the complete absence of anything but ‘medicated news’. It would have further distressed her to learn how the owner of the Daily Express, Max Beaverbrook, had inserted fabricated reports in the closing stages of the Norway Campaign. On 1 May, Beaverbrook gleefully told Leo Amery of ‘the false news he has been putting in to cover our withdrawal’.74 In Canada, Prime Minister Mackenzie King suspected earlier than most British politicians the degree to which ‘we have been given much too one-sided accounts in all our papers …’ In Downing Street, Colville watched the faces at the Cabinet table grow longer and longer – and suddenly realised that even Ministers had been ‘partially misled by the extravagant optimism of the press.’75, 76 The Information Minister John Reith had to admit that he knew ‘no more about what was happening in Norway than the man in the street’.77

  Already, the paucity of good news had begun to sap the confidence of those who recalled Churchill’s invigorating promise to sink every German ship in the Skagerrak. As Evelyn Waugh noted in Men at Arms, ‘the smell of failure had been borne to them from Norway on the East wind’.78 The numbers of people carrying gas masks in Piccadilly Circus trebled. To Frances Partridge, her Wiltshire Downs looked dried out and colourless beneath a heavy, battleship-coloured cloud. Round and round in her head went the possibility of air raids on London.

  Scales tumbled from eyes with Chamberlain’s interim statement in the Commons, with the return of ‘Maurice Force’ and ‘Sickle Force’, and with Leland Stowe’s syndicated and unvarnished reports on the fall of Steinkjer.

  When Violet Bonham Carter learned of the evacuation on 2 May, she felt ‘completely “winded” with horror & amazement – for we had heard nothing from Govt.79 spokesmen but the most optimistic forecasts & reports’. After all the talk of victory, Britain’s armed forces turned out to have nothing to show for their opening clash with the German war machine, other than what Stowe headlined as a ‘catastrophic defeat’ in central Norway and a ‘stalemate’ at Narvik – where that unhappy pair Mackesy and Cork sat in furious impotence waiting for the Arctic snow to thaw.

  The effect of this discovery on Margery Allingham was ‘almost indescribable’.80 It was, she wrote, like suddenly noticing that the man driving the charabanc in which you were careering down an S-bend mountain road was slightly tight and not a brilliant driver. ‘I thought the Government was working like a fiend to get ready for a smashing spring offensive, probably in the north, and I thought we were incomparably better equipped, especially in the air, than we turned out to be … It never occurred to me that we were in such danger.’

  O
n his arrival back in London, Peter Fleming observed behaviour that was ‘scarcely capable of rational explanation’ – people’s complete failure, until this moment, to take the possibility of invasion into account, ‘as though a kind of black-out had expunged from their minds, and even from their instincts, the lessons of history’.81

  In Poland, we were not there; we had not seen it. Norway made tangible for the first time the disastrous picture of what happened when Hitler succeeded. It reminded everyone that the British Isles were not unconquerable after all. At the Soviet Ambassador’s residence in Mayfair, Maisky asked Moscow for instructions how to conduct himself ‘if the Germans were to occupy the district in London in which our Embassy is situated’.82 The American Embassy prepared to advise all 4,000 US citizens in Britain to return home by way of Éire. Baba Metcalfe’s sister watched the new ‘Irene’ barrage balloon, which had been named after her, float in the sky above Regent’s Park like a great silver elephant. ‘Each day and night we have been expecting the German bombers and tanks to arrive.’fn2 83, 84

  A captive of the Nazis, Giles Romilly could not inform British readers about the circumstances in which unsupported and insufficiently equipped British battalions had been badly cut up in Norway. In effect, Leland Stowe filed for him. ‘Everything was very clear now.85 It was not only a defeat; it was a rout, and behind the rout lay a colossal, almost unbelievable blunder.’

  The reports by ‘one of America’s most respected newspapermen’, as A. J. Sylvester called Stowe, spread consternation not just in Whitehall.86 On 3 May, the social research organisation Mass Observation noted two marked tendencies. A soaring distrust of news channels, and a rapid increase in pessimism. The journalist Kingsley Martin paced up and down the terrace of the House of Commons with Conservative MP Sir Ralph Glyn. ‘He told me the Home Guard had really nothing to fight with except garden tools, because the only rifles we had were on the high seas coming from the United States.’87 Frances Campbell-Preston was a friend both of Giles Romilly and Peter Fleming, and a future lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. She was living in Scotland when she heard about the evacuation from Namsos. She says: ‘We talked about how we would go into caves, Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that.’88

  How would Britain escape the Blitzkrieg? How could these disasters have happened? Who was responsible? Mingled with the panic and fear came demands for ‘unmedicated’ explanations – and for heads. Margery Allingham’s villagers represented the nation in wanting to hear about the causes of the failure, what had gone wrong with the timing, ‘who had muffed it’.89

  For the first time in the war, Allingham noticed an odd phenomenon. Public life became melodramatic, and private life formal and ordinary. Living in Tolleshunt D’Arcy ‘was like following a quiet domestic film which had been accidentally photographed on the negative of a sensational thriller’.90

  The setting for that thriller was Westminster. Once Chamberlain had responded to Attlee’s call and committed himself to a debate in the Commons, promising fuller information about the planning of the Norwegian military expedition, he exposed his leadership to every sort of rival and would-be assassin. Allingham sensed the fear and tension rising in her village. Tolleshunt D’Arcy – or Auburn as she fictionalised it – had ‘something far more serious to worry about than even the loss of the Norseland coast.91 Auburn was worrying about the Prime Minister.’

  Five years as Viceroy of India had taught Halifax about civilian unrest, and he smelled the gunpowder in the air. The Foreign Secretary recognised that ‘the debate is likely to range over wider ground than Norway alone’.92 He had ‘no doubt the affair will do the Govt.93 and the Allies a great deal of mischief’.

  Potentially more damaging than ‘the fiasco in Norway’, as Labour’s garrulous spokesman Hugh Dalton publicly referred to it, was the battlefront that Colville saw opening up in the House of Commons.94 ‘What disgusts me is that everybody is concentrating their energies on an internal political crisis (à la française) instead of taking thought for the morrow about Hitler’s next move.’95 When MPs learned further details about the reasons for the awful reverse, then it was bound to bring to a head the accumulated discontent of the past three years.

  The Conservative MP Chips Channon viewed the coming storm with a churning stomach. ‘A Westminster war added to a German one is really too much.’96 General Ironside regarded the fallout among his colleagues with the same revulsion. The War Cabinet, he wrote in his diary, ‘were thinking more of public opinion than of the military disaster’, and he noted how every Minister, ‘including the P.M.’, was beginning to make up stories they could tell the public.97

  The stories needed to be exceptional. On 3 May, Ironside heard that ‘there is a first-class row commencing in the House and there is a strong movement to get rid of the P.M.’ A young Conservative backbencher had told Leland Stowe on the eve of his departure for Norway that it would take nothing short of a major disaster to remove Neville Chamberlain.98 ‘Well, Steinkjer was a disaster,’ Stowe now pointed out.99 ‘Maybe there is enough dynamite here even to rock 10 Downing Street?’

  Leo Amery felt so. ‘It is all terrible, and must mean the end of the Government and perhaps of Winston as well.’100

  These impassioned conversations continued as the convoys from Namsos and Åndalsnes steamed towards Scapa Flow on Saturday 4 May and Sunday 5 May. General Ironside had considered it nothing less than his duty to remain in London that weekend – unlike two thirds of the War Cabinet. He could not damp down his contempt for his political masters as he prepared to travel north to welcome back the troops. ‘Most of the Ministers are away for the Sunday and they are all employed making up the speeches which they will have to make to excuse their operations.101 A miserable state of affairs.’

  PART THREE

  THE WEEKEND BEFORE

  11

  MONSIEUR J’AIMEBERLIN

  ‘Chamberlain. What a man.1 With a face like a nutcracker and a soul like a weasel. How long are the English going to put up with the bastards who run the country?’

  MARTHA GELLHORN to H. G. WELLS, 13 June 1938

  ‘He seemed the reincarnation of St. George … I don’t know what this country has done to deserve him.’2

  CHIPS CHANNON MP, 28 September 1938

  ‘When the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting.3 There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values.’

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, from his valediction on NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, 12 November 1940

  As HMS York carried Fleming and Lindsay back from Norway, the Prime Minister’s chauffeur drove Neville Chamberlain and his wife to Chequers for a ‘much needed rest’.4

  The War Cabinet had a scheme in which three out of the nine Ministers remained in London on Sunday. A new rota system meant that when it was his turn off Chamberlain could leave town on Friday. He planned to use the weekend to prepare his statement for the debate on Norway.

  In those days, the Prime Minister had to provide his own car and chauffeur out of his salary. In the back of his Armstrong Siddeley – upon buying which he had remarked cheerfully: ‘One may as well reach the Bankruptcy Court in comfort!’ – Chamberlain’s mood was ‘light-hearted’.5, 6 The evacuation had been successful; the political situation at home had improved. He was aware that various MPs were scheming to overthrow the government, but he thought that the situation was not so serious as his Minister of Information maintained. Chamberlain consoled himself that the press and ‘the good British public’, in spite of their anxieties, remained broadly supportive of his leadership.7 His spirits lifted further on arriving at Chequers, shortly after 6.30 p.m., to see that the new summer house had been erected. The wild cherries were in bloom, and three willow tits sat in the bird boxes.

  Chamberlain hated to be disturbed at weekends. He never took a Private Secretary with him to Chequers, or his typist Miss Watson. Until the outbreak of war, he had communicated with the world from a single telephone in the pantry, to be used for
emergencies.

  One of very few regular guests invited to the Prime Minister’s country retreat in Buckinghamshire was his twenty-one-year-old niece Valerie Cole, who lived with the Chamberlains in London. She said: ‘When they went to Chequers, I went.8 He had a chauffeur called Card who used to drive me mad. He would never drive over twenty miles per hour. Nothing would make him go quicker.’ In this last respect, the devoted and long-serving Mr Card was not unlike his employer.

  Valerie had a room on the top floor at No. 10, and was accustomed to what his critics saw as her uncle’s unsociableness. The only time her aunt scolded her was when Valerie invited back an Irish Guards officer to Downing Street. ‘She was very protective of Uncle Neville.9 She didn’t want people to bother him.’ The result of this tight shield around the Prime Minister, wrote one of his earliest biographers, Derek Walker-Smith, whose unauthorised study of Chamberlain had come out a few weeks before, was ‘an almost complete ignorance … as to his tastes and habits in private life’.10

  No word got into the press, for instance, about the close family connection between the Prime Minister – whose public persona was characterised by a reputation for humourless sobriety coupled with a fastidiousness in his business dealings – and the bankrupt remittance man who had earned the title of ‘the biggest practical joker in England’.11 Valerie’s spendthrift father – Anne Chamberlain’s brother – was Horace de Vere Cole, known by Augustus John as ‘the God of Mischief’.fn1

  Mischief produced no income, though. By the 1930s, Chamberlain was having to pay his brother-in-law a weekly stipend of £3. De Vere Cole died destitute in France in 1936, the year before Chamberlain took over from Stanley Baldwin, but he had always considered Neville ‘incurably modest and un-selfassertive’ – and far too old to be Prime Minister.12 At first glance, no two men could have been more opposite in character or led more different lives.