Five Days in London, May 1940

by John Lukacs

  Again Hitler was not altogether wrong. When Churchill appeared in the House of Commons three days after his appointment, he was greeted with little or no enthusiasm by the Conservative Party, many members of which now seemed to have been in a mild state of emotional hangover, slightly ashamed of the burst of emotion that had helped to bring Chamberlain down. Lord Davidson wrote to Stanley Baldwin: “The Tories don’t trust Winston.… After the first clash of war is over it may well be that a sounder Government may emerge.”11 Churchill knew how dependent he was on the Conservative Party, and on Chamberlain. He treated the latter with a compound of prudence and magnanimity. (“I am in your hands,” he wrote to Chamberlain.) He brought a few new people into his cabinet, but the composition of it did not change drastically. All of this is known by historians, and we shall return to evidences of a distrust for Churchill. When on 13 May he made his famous “blood, sweat, toil and tears” speech, so impressive when read now, and emotionally honest, it was not too well received by many Conservatives in the House.

  But it was the greater and dramatic and terrifying flow of events that we must now consider: the fact that the first fortnight of Churchill’s prime ministership was a time of crashing disasters. Disasters for Britain and Churchill, triumphs for Germany and Hitler. Here was the proof of a new model German army, welded together by an iron sense of national self-confidence, directed by a new model of generalship, equipped with new visions and new armor for a new kind of warfare. Three days after their start the Germans broke across the French lines at Sedan. Holland surrendered. Brussels was abandoned. On the tenth day the Germans were at the English Channel, which they had not been able to reach during the entire First World War. The French and British armies in Flanders and Belgium were trapped. In many places the French fought not at all. Churchill flew over the Channel to Paris twice, encouraging their leaders, but with not much effect. Some of their military chiefs and politicians were beginning to consider the necessity for an armistice with the Germans, through the mediation of Mussolini. Mussolini all but declared that Italy would soon enter the war on Hitler’s side. The plan for a French-British counterattack, aimed at cutting through the nose of the advancing German armored crocodile,12 did not come about. The British, and Churchill, were now forced to begin considering the removal of the British Expeditionary Force across the Channel — if that were possible at all. British and French troops were pushed back to Boulogne and Calais, presently surrounded by the Germans. And if the French fought badly or not at all, the British in Belgium fought not much better (except, perhaps, in the air, but there, too, their attempts at bombing important bridges were useless). On the ground, except for one failed counter-move at Arras, the BEF had engaged in no real battles with the Germans; its falling back was more orderly than that of the French, but still it was retreat after retreat.

  The Germans seemed invincible, and the world was stunned. So was Hitler. He hardly believed his luck. For once, he was more cautious than were many of his generals. For once, his self-confidence — his greatest asset, which, throughout his career, rested on his feral, instinctive understanding of his opponents’ weaknesses — wobbled a bit. He was nervous and worried. He did not quite realize what his German troops were capable of. During the days of his army’s most rapid advances — the seventeenth and the eighteenth — he kept warning his generals against the dangers of a British-French counterattack, which never came. There was another, probably more important matter on his mind. He thought that the British would soon recognize the futility of warring against him. He believed that Churchill’s days as leader were numbered, that the British would soon turn away from Churchill and respond to a peace offer from him. On 21 May he told General Franz Halder, “We are seeking contact with England on the basis of a division of the world.” The English would see the light, sooner rather than later. He, Hitler, was astride a great wave, representing the Present and perhaps the Future. Churchill was struggling on the shore, representing an antiquated and useless Past. Hitler also thought that he had the trust and faith of the vast majority of Germans, more than Churchill could count on among the British. Was he altogether wrong? Yes and no. No, because this was how things seemed, and while what happens may not be identical with what people think happens in the long run, the two are inseparable in the short run. Yes, because the majority of the British people refused to recognize how close Hitler had come to an ultimate triumph and how close they had come to their ultimate defeat. But their martial spirit was not unwavering, and they were not — yet—annealed to Churchill.

  In a secret memorandum to the War Cabinet, Robert Boothby (a Conservative MP and a Churchillian) wrote on 20 March that Hitler’s Germans represented “the incredible conception of a movement— young, virile, dynamic, and violent—which is advancing irresistibly to overthrow a decaying old world, that we must continually bear in mind; for it is the main source of the Nazi strength and power.”13 On the very day that the real war broke out in the West, Chamberlain wrote in his diary that Joseph Kennedy (the defeatist American ambassador) told him that he didn’t see how Britain could carry on without the French: “I told him I did not see how we could either.”14 On 15 May Lieutenant General Henry Pownall wrote in his diary, sizing up what had happened to the French at the Meuse and Sedan. “Three armies to withdraw because of the initiative shown by one German battalion commander.”15 On 17 May the Ministry of Information suggested to the War Cabinet that “more should be done to inform the general public of the seriousness of the situation, about which most people [are] in complete ignorance.”16 Most people, perhaps, but not all of them. On 14-15 May a quarter of a million queued up at the local police stations to enroll in the Local Defense Volunteers, soon to be renamed the Home Guard. But on 17 May the society photographer Cecil Beaton, on his way to America, wrote in his diary, “My own private courage was badly bruised, and each person one spoke to was more depressing than the last. … A mood of panic was gripping upperclass circles.”17 General Sir Edmund Ironside, chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote in his diary on the same day, “At the moment it looks like the greatest military disaster in all history.”18

  On the eighteenth, Sir Samuel Hoare wrote in his diary: “Neville completely knocked out. Everything finished. The USA no good. We could never get our army out, nor if we did it would be without any equipment.”19 (This even before the Germans reached the Channel.)

  That very day, Churchill, at the end of a dispatch to General Ismay, for the first time raised the possibility of a French surrender: “The Chiefs of Staff must consider whether it would not be well to send only half the so-called Armoured Division to France. One must always be prepared for the fact that the French may be offered very advantageous terms of peace, and the whole weight be thrown on us.”20 On 19 May, returning from the cabinet and walking “the ugly staircase of the War Office to [his] room, General Ironside told Anthony Eden: ‘This is the end of the British Empire.’ He spoke the words flatly and as a mere statement of military fact. He did not believe that we could hold out alone for more than a few months.”21

  On 19 May Oliver Harvey wrote in his diary, “Defeatism in London among the richer classes.”22 On the same day Chamberlain in his diary: “The scene … darken[s] every hour.” A day later: “Nothing to relieve anxiety.” On the twenty-first: the situation is “desperate.” On the twenty-third: “another bleak day.” The French “had done nothing,” their generals were “beneath contempt,” and their soldiers, “with some exceptions, … would not fight and not even march.”23

  At night on the twenty-first, Churchill’s new secretary, John Colville: “Dined at Betty Montagu’s flat… and tried unsuccessfully not to talk about the war. … It is clear that the full horror of the situation is dawning on people.”24 On 22 May Charles Waterhouse, a Conservative MP, no friend of Churchill’s, wrote in his diary, “‘All is lost’ sort of attitude in evidence in many quarters.”25

  “Many quarters” may be too vague and—perhaps — exaggerated.
“All is lost”: that kind of defeatism was not discernible, at least not among the mass of the people. Note, too, that these were the days (the twenty-first to the twenty-fourth, Tuesday to Friday) when both the press and the government expected the French-British counteroffensive at Arras-Amiens against the Bulge (an expectation also propelled by false news); when there came the news of the change of the French high command, the sacking of General Maurice Gamelin and his replacement by General Maxime Weygand, from whom much was expected; when Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk were still in Allied hands, indeed the first two filled by units shipped to them from England. Yet cracks were appearing in morale, and the incompetence of the War Office was becoming fatefully evident. The Germans began their siege of Boulogne on the twenty-second. The arms ordered by the War Office, shipped mostly in the large vessel City of Christchurch, were badly packed and often unusable. “At 9 P.M. the ship’s crew and the stevedores refused to continue [the unloading] owing to the visit of the Luftwaffe.” An officer “even had to place some of the crew under guard.”26 Meanwhile, two elite British units, the First Battallion of the Queen Victoria Rifles and the Rifle Brigade (the Green Jackets), were shipped to Calais on the twenty-second and twenty-third, put under the command of Brigadier Claude Nicholson, a brave officer who was to die in German captivity. As Airey Neave (a Churchillian) wrote: ‘Whatever may be said of the ultimate merit of Churchill’s decision to hold Calais ‘to the death,’ the manner in which [these regiments] were hastily dispatched to France was shameful.… [In their story] farce and tragedy are intimately combined.… Their orders were depressingly obscure and they had no idea what to expect on arrival at Calais.” There, too, on 23 May, stevedores refused to work when the German shells began to fall; a Rifle Brigade officer had to find and force them out from “various holes and corners.”27

  During these crucial days the conduct of the command in London, that is, the management of the war by the War Office, beggars belief, marked as it was by lassitude, incompetence, and confusion.

  During these days Churchill’s position was not—yet—shaken. Perhaps the habitual slowness of British minds contributed to that; perhaps — and this is more likely—there seemed to be as yet no alternative to him, no spokesman for a course other than his. Still, the record of his past—his mistakes, the oddity of his character — was a burden, even though he did not see it that way. Nonetheless we must sum up some of its ingredients, together with some of the evidences of the distrust with which many of his own party saw him during these rapidly darkening days and nights.

  “Although he was an aristocrat by birth, Churchill was widely believed to be not really a gentleman at all. On the contrary, he was often described as a highly gifted, but undeniable, ‘cad.’” He was “widely distrusted as a man of unstable temperament, unsound judgment, and rhetorical (and also alcoholic) excess.… For most of his career, there hung around him an unsavoury air of disreputability and unseemliness, as a particularly wayward, roodess and anachronistic product of a decaying and increasingly discredited aristocratic order. Before 1940, it was not easy for him to be taken seriously as the man of destiny he believed himself to be, when so many people in the know regarded him as little better than an ungentlemanly, almost déclassé, adventurer.” During the interwar years he remained “a shameless cadger and incorrigible scrounger.” “[His] friends were almost invariably drawn from [a] raffish world.” “By the mid -1930S … [he] had become almost a parody of the paranoid aristocrat: intransigent, embittered, apocalyptic, ‘a reactionary of the deepest dye.’ “28 These generalizations by David Cannadine have the mark of a heavy pen; they are somewhat exaggerated, but they are not without substance. Perhaps more balanced, but not essentially different, are the summary sentences by Andrew Roberts. “The national saviour image of Winston Churchill in 1940 is so deeply ingrained into the British psyche as to make any criticism of his conduct during that year sound almost blasphemous. At the outset of that annus mirabilis, however, he was not considered the splendid personification of British glory he was to become later on. Rather he was seen by many in society and in the Conservative Party as a political turncoat, a dangerous adventurer.” At best he was a “delightful rogue who lacked political judgment,” at worst “unscrupulous, unreliable, and unattractively ambitious.” Churchill’s wit and oratorical ability were not enough to overcome severe doubts about his judgment.”29 Besides, some of his enemies often referred to him as a “half-breed” (his mother having been American, and a woman with more than one past) or a “mongrel.”

  Much of this would change in 1940. But not immediately. It is of course not our task here to describe or analyze the ups and downs in the long history of Winston Churchill’s reputation. But we must be concerned with him during the fateful fortnight of 10 to 24 May. On 10 May the king evidently preferred Halifax, with whom he and the queen (who disliked Churchill) had had very good private relations. (They had dined together on occasion; Halifax also had the key to the palace garden.) There was, too, an “almost universal expectation that Churchill’s ministry was going to be short-lived.”30 “Almost universal” may be too much, but, again, it was not without serious substance. Many, perhaps most, of the Conservative MPs distrusted Churchill. They cheered Chamberlain and sat on their hands when Churchill first appeared in the House of Commons as prime minister. Churchill noticed and remembered this (David Lloyd George thought that Churchill was afraid of Chamberlain). During the Black Fortnight these opponents of Churchill had few reasons to change their minds. Now the talkative warmonger had his chance. And what had he brought about, as so often in his mercurial past? Nothing but disaster after disaster—in spite of the artifice of his rhetoric, in spite of his habitual declarations, and not only in spite of but because of his habitual trust in the French.

  The words “crooks,” “gangsters,” and “wild men” appear in many of the diaries and letters of the period, referring to Churchill’s new government. Among the papers of reputable members of the establishment and the government, those of Lord Hankey, who was still chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, are illustrative.31 On 10 May Hankey wrote to his son: “The net result of it all is that today, when the greatest battle of the war and probably the greatest battle of our history has begun, when the fate of the whole Empire is at stake, we are to have a Government of politicians, … quite a number of whom are perfectly futile people.” To Samuel Hoare two days later: “God help the country … which commits its existence to the hands of a dictator whose past achievements, even though inspired by a certain amount of imagination, have never achieved success! … An untried and wholly inexperienced politician.… The only hope lies in the solid core of Churchill, Chamberlain and Halifax, but whether the wise old elephants will ever be able to hold the Rogue Elephant, I doubt.” Hoare answered on 14 May: “Are you and I partners in adversity? I do not know!” Chamberlain, who (unlike Halifax) refrained from criticizing Churchill, was critical of Churchill’s “method of government making,” though only in his diary and in his letters to his sister. Among the military chiefs, Lieutenant General Henry Pownall made scathing comments in his diary. On 30 April, before the change of government, he charged: “Great as are [Churchill’s] uses he is also a real danger, always tempted by the objective, never counting his resources to see if the objective is attainable. And he is unlucky. He was throughout the last war; and that is a real thing and a bad and dangerous failing.” On 20 May, about a move toward Amiens: “a scandalous (i.e. Winstonized) plan.” On 24 May: “Here are Winston’s plans again. Can nobody prevent his trying to conduct operations himself as a super Commander-in-Chief? How does he think we are to collect eight divisions and attack as he suggests. He can have no conception of our situation and conditions. How is an attack like this to be staged involving three nationalities at an hour’s notice? [This was an unfair analysis of the then situation.] The man is mad.”32

  Yet those who were now working close to Churchill began to appreciate some of his qualities. A telling exam
ple is John Colville’s diary entries, for two reasons. One is the gradual and apparently genuine conversion of a young upper-class person and civil servant from a distrust of to a respect for Churchill; the other is that the Colville diary (including his fine handwriting) is a period piece, surely of May 1940. On 9 May: “Wagered … a champagne dinner that Mr. C. [Chamberlain] would still be Prime Minister by the end of the month.… Dined with Mrs Henley and went on afterwards to dance at the Savoy. … I thought … the Churchill girl [Mary] rather supercilious.… The Savoy was stuffy and I felt jaded, devitalized and utterly uninteresting.” Next morning (a radiant morning, and Hitler’s D-Day) : “Rode at Richmond in summer heat. As I dismounted the groom told me that Holland and Belgium had been invaded. Nothing can stop [Churchill] having his way — because of his powers of blackmail.… Rab [R. A. Butler, who hated Churchill] said that the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history … this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble … “33 On 13 May: “Went down to the House to hear the new Prime Minister.… He made a brilliant little [little?] speech.” But also: “I spent the day in a bright blue suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors, cheap and sensational-looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.” Three days later some respect for Churchill is already discernible in Colville’s diary, though, deciphering Churchill’s telegram to the Cabinet from Paris (including phrases such as “the mortal gravity of the hour”), Colville still records the remarks of two other secretaries: “He is still thinking of his books” and “his blasted rhetoric.” And by 18 May a certain admiration appears: “Winston, who is full of fight and thrives on crisis and adversity…” Colville has also begun to have an appreciation of Churchill’s carefulness: “Such is the change that high office can work in a man’s inherent love of rash and spectacular action.”34