Five Days in London, May 1940

by John Lukacs

  On 19 May Churchill first broadcast to the people through the BBC. It was a good speech, but it included a fateful sentence: “For myself, I have invincible confidence in the French army and its leaders.” This was not true. His confidence in the French army, far from being “invincible,” was in fact running out. He had already begun to contemplate that the French might give up fighting altogether. During the next seven days he tried to pursue two parallel courses of action which, in the end, proved contradictory. One was essentially continental, the other essentially maritime. One was to urge a French-British counteroffensive aimed at the German Bulge, or Snout, the other to prepare the withdrawal of the entire British army from the Continent. One meant sending yet more troops to Boulogne and Calais, but only for the other purpose, to slow down the German advance toward the last evacuation port of Dunkirk. Churchill flew over to Paris again and seems to have returned in good spirits. But late in the morning of the twenty-third, Monday, he told the War Cabinet: “The whole success of the plan agreed with the French depended on the French forces taking the offensive. At present they showed no signs of doing that. … If General Weygand’s plan succeeded” — and we know now that Weygand never had such a plan35 — “it would mean the release of 35 Allied divisions from their present serious predicament. If it failed, it would be necessary to make a fresh plan with the object of saving and bringing back to this country as many of our best troops and weapons with as little loss as possible.”36 With as little loss as possible. Churchill knew that that was almost impossible. His household diary records that he then returned to his quarters in Admiralty House for lunch and that dinner on 23 May was short. Later, after dinner, he went to Buckingham Palace to see the king. At half past ten he told the king that if the French plan failed, he would have to order the BEF back to England. “This operation would mean the loss of all guns, tanks, ammunition, and all stores in France” the king recorded in his diary. “The question was whether we could get the troops back from Calais and Dunkirk. The very thought of having to order this movement is appalling, as the loss of life will probably be immense.”37

  Such was the situation when night fell on Thursday, 23 May 1940. At least one-quarter of a million British troops were trapped by the Germans. They were retreating rather than making a stand, still not putting up much fight against the probing advance of their enemies. Boulogne had fallen, and Calais was beginning to be surrounded by the Germans. Meanwhile, General Heinz Wilhelm Guderian was approaching Dunkirk from the south; other German generals were leaning against the retreating BEF from the east. There were not many British troops left to the south, in the rest of France, and not much of an army in Britain itself.

  The British people knew some of this but not much. The tone of the BBC was well mannered and somber, not providing misleading or inaccurate news, but also not suggesting what the Germans’ surrounding of the quarter million meant. The newspapers’ reporting was generally inaccurate: they gave the impression of a great historic battle in northern France, with little indication of what the portents might be. But in May 1940 the radio and the press did not quite reflect or form what the British people were thinking. And we must turn to other sources and attempt to reconstruct something of the thinking and the mood of the people, no matter how incomplete such a reconstruction must necessarily be. The reason for this is that by 1940 the world, or at least the Western world, had entered the democratic age. “Opinion,” Pascal had written three hundred years before, “is the queen of the world.” But unlike three hundred years earlier, now the opinion (or, more precisely, the thinking) of majorities mattered. Hitler knew this. He knew that he had the overwhelming majority of the German people behind him. What mattered was whether the great majority of the British people were really behind Churchill. And, if so, for how long?

  Churchill crossing Horse Guards Parade on 20 May: “On 19 May Churchill first broadcast to the people through the BBC. It was a good speech, but it included a fateful sentence: Tor myself, I have invincible confidence in the French army and its leaders.’ This was not true…”

  Before we attempt this necessarily incomplete sketch of this important matter, we must keep two conditions in mind. One is the seldom recognized difference between public opinion and popular sentiment. Briefly put: that which is public is not necessarily popular, and opinion is not necessarily the same thing as sentiment. There are many examples in history, and not the least in the history of democracies, when public opinion and popular sentiment are not only different but often diverge.38 In the nineteenth century, public opinion was the opinion of the middle and upper classes, not of the lower, or working, class, even though working-class people gradually became newspaper readers and voters. Much of this class distinction was still evident in Britain in 1940, although fortuitously it proved not to be decisive. But it did exist, and we have now seen some of its evidences — for example, the “panic” that seemed to have gripped some people in the upper classes on 18-19 May. Yet nothing of that had filtered down into the newspapers, and the great majority of people were unaware of it. What it signifies is that, here and there, some people (mostly in London) became suddenly aware of the seeming hopelessness of the situation.

  Another group of people among whom evidences of defeatism existed in mid-May were intellectuals. “The artist” Ezra Pound once wrote, “is the antennae of the race” But in 1940 this was not so. Cyril Connolly, not a defeatist (he started his Horizon in January 1940), feared that in the event of German bombing the people would panic (George Orwell told him that he did not agree). In the surviving writings and reminiscences of writers the record about May 1940 is confusing and mixed. In Put Out More Flags (written in 1942), Evelyn Waugh wrote of “that odd, dead period before the Churchillian renaissance.” (The book ends in June 1940: “There’s a new spirit abroad.… I see it on every side.”)39 Ten years later, in Men at Arms, there is not one glimmer of a Churchillian renaissance; indeed, Waugh said that he abhorred Churchill and his rhetoric, as did Malcolm Muggeridge (but he, too, only well after the war). There is no Churchillian renaissance, indeed, nothing of May 1940, in Anthony Powell’s Valley of Bones, the seventh novel in his Dance to the Music of Time, which is set during the first half of 1940. Careful readers may detect a suggestive element in Kenneth Clark’s autobiographical Another Part of the Wood: A Self Portrait (1974). Clark was not a typical intellectual but, rather, a knowledgeable and well-situated figure within the upper reaches of the establishment. Elegant and sleek, he was for years rather close to Chamberlain. In these memoirs, decades after the war, he writes sympathetically but critically of Chamberlain: “I was in fact unequivocally on the side of Mr. Churchill.40 Unequivocally? Not—yet—in May 1940.

  The other distinction that we must keep in mind is the one between understanding and knowing. To invoke Pascal again: “We understand more than we know.” According to logic, understanding is not only the result of knowledge; it necessarily follows knowledge. Yet there are myriad instances and examples when understanding precedes knowledge, indeed, when it leads to knowledge. Allow me, then, to essay this generalization: in May 1940 most British men and women understood some things that they did not yet know. Or they understood some things that they did not wish to think about, even as they were capable of thinking about them (a very British inclination). We shall, I hope, give some illustrations of this in the following pages, indeed, throughout this book.41

  There exist numerous books and diaries and reminiscences of people and writers about the late summer of 1940 and the Blitz, but not very many about May 1940. One exception is The Oaken Heart, by the detective-story writer Margery Allingham. The book is a kind of diary, reproduced (and perhaps edited here and there) for her American friends, about “Auburn,” the village in Essex where she lived. Since a fair amount of it was written during the Black Fortnight in May 1940, it may be worth citing parts of it here in some detail.42 On 14 or 15 May Allingham heard Queen Wilhelmina speaking on the BBC: “Showed us country people that she
was a proper Queen, … [but] she brought something else right home to many of us. Courage was not going to be enough. For the first time probably in all our history we were not going to get by, this time, with just courage and the improvisation it brings with it.” On Sunday morning (most probably 19 May), Allingham talks with a former corporal of the First World War: “That was the first time I ever heard anyone in the country question the reliability of the French, although some informed circles [in London] had been whispering about it uneasily for months. Mr Parker said he only hoped that there was some sort of a trap waiting somewhere, and that in the past we had permitted dangerous advances for that very purpose.” On 20 May: “The method of the German advance fascinated everybody. In the next few days it was discussed exhaustively by everyone who came in and who we met in the square.” Also: “The Captain admired the enemy efficiency from a purely professional point of view. You had to hand it to that feller Hitler, he said, He knew how to get a move on.”43 Unlike during the First World War, there was now the prospect of invasion.

  The next morning we were still not invaded. Still no German soldiers, with or without disguise, had dropped out of the sky, and I could not help hoping with Norry, who insisted “all this will pass” as if it were a stone or a tree, that it would never come. However, we knew it was criminal just to hope. Already the cry “wishful thinking” was being thrown at us bitterly as if we had originated the sin and we were inclined to resent it. (There is a tendency to take everything very personally in Auburn.) We had never been optimists about anything and had been called “defeatists” in our times.

  Meanwhile the news was growing rapidly frightful.… We were told not to use the telephone if we could help it and we felt cut off and very ignorant.

  “Meanwhile, round about this time, maybe a day or so later, odd news was beginning to creep in from Flinthannock and all along the coast. Unexpected people mentioned it, many of whom did not at first see its terrifying significance. The Government were collecting little boats and men to man them. What for? Things were as bad as that, were they?” She continues: “What a sporting chance, though! What a move! How like old Churchill! How tragically makeshift, but how traditional!”44

  In addition to such personal recollections, there exists another, rather valuable fund of sources of evidences of public opinion and popular sentiment in Britain at that time. These are the files of “Mass-Observation,” or M-O, as it came to be known, preserved in the archives of the University of Sussex.45 In the United States a milestone in the history of public opinion research was the establishment of the Gallup Institute in Princeton in 1935. Two years later two enterprising Englishmen, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson (“who had come into ‘people-watching’ via his interest in bird-watching and natural history”: Dorothy Sheridan), created M-O. They “began to recruit a nationwide panel of Observers to participate in a study of everyday life,” mostly for commercial purposes, but in 1938 they expanded their scope to politics and war. In May 1940 they began to transmit materials and even give recommendations to the Ministry of Information. Unlike Gallup and other Americans engaged in public opinion research, they made no pretense to anything “scientific” and did not attempt to quantify all their data. That is exactly where the value of these materials resides. They are first-hand reports, typed by intelligent, commonsensical, mostly middle-class observers, many of them women volunteers. Even these many years later, their summaries breathe with the presence of authenticity and genuine concern.46

  London householders, take the pictures off the walls, store our valuables in the basement, put buckets of sand in the passages, keep the bath filled with water, and make similar preparations.… This done, visit the hairdresser, deciding that if I must be bombed, I may as well be bombed with neatly arranged hair” (England’s Hour, 30–31).

  Here, for example, are items from the closely typed, one-page summary of 16 May (FR 124, C 7, nine long paragraphs) :

  Exceptionally intensive investigation had been made today on the impact of latest news from Belgium and France.…

  People have become distinctly more worried today. A proportion are now feeling desperate, though this does not mean that they think we shall not win in the end. A feeling of Hitler’s superiority grows.…

  Deeply concerned people are keeping up a good deal of optimism today, though all observers agree in finding that face and tone often belie the words.…

  People haven’t begun to consider that we might be actually beaten. It just hasn’t occurred to most people that we can be beaten. The old complacency has been shaken, but it persists. If suddenly shattered, there will be a morale explosion.

  Women are much more worried than men, and some are now showing definite terror of the immediate future. They are much more bewildered than men, and many are unable to grasp what is happening at all, especially working-class.

  On 19 May “there is an improvement in tone today. Especially in London, but not in Lancashire.”47 “People remain confident that we will win in the long run, but today still shows plenty of implicit or unconscious defeatism, and a few open references to German victory.”

  “A feeling of grave seriousness remains …” Admiralty Arch was fortified to defend Whitehall against attack by German parachutists landing in Trafalgar Square; beyond the Arch are the Admiralty and St. James’s Park.

  That night — 19 May—Churchill first broadcast to the people of Britain. The general reaction was favorable, mostly because of his straightforward phrases about the gravity of the situation. On 20 May M-O “observers report that tension is slightly relieved today, … slightly less gloom, slightly more detachment about people’s attitude to the news.… A feeling of grave seriousness remains, if anything emphasized by Churchill’s broadcast.… Women conspicuously more worried than men today. General feeling is that we should pull through, just.” On 21 May a very discerning observer reports: “There is still no one view which can with any justice be labelled ‘public opinion’ — it is too varied and unformed. The most certain thing remains the belief that Britain will triumph eventually.”

  “Women remain, as usual, more pessimistic and less optimistic than men.”

  Next day, “unexpectedly,” investigations “report that morale is down, or rather that anxiety is up.”

  Women are in a particularly depressed condition, and today for the first time, some are openly showing it.… On the other hand, many men and some women still feel confident that the situation is not really as bad as supposed, and comparisons with the last war are often brought up.

  The fear that a Nazi invasion is possible is now beginning to appear.

  The bewilderment and distress is more severe today than ever before, and the disillusion about all our past confidence and proud leadership is becoming a major strain on ordinary simple minds.

  In Bolton people are much more calm than in London. Three investigators there made the following pertinent comment on this morning’s detailed investigations: “The public is deliberately burying its head in the sands. This attitude is more common among the women.” Londoners are more pessimistic.

  “The result of the speeches given in the last few days by Churchill and Duff Cooper … is to engender a feeling of relief, not because the situation is not serious, but because the people feel they know the worst, which is a new experience for them.”

  It may be of some interest that many of the observers write about “feeling” rather than “thinking” (customary in English, of course, but perhaps worth noticing, given the overlap but still existing difference between opinions and sentiments). Thus, on 23 May, “a noticeable increase in cheerfulness and general calm, a distinct decrease in pessimism and extreme nervousness … for the time being. The intense gloom which affected many in London yesterday, mainly among the middle-classes, but also some of the working-classes, is not conspicuous today.”

  “The feeling that a big effort is going to be required and that our leaders are capable of asking for it … is growing. The feelin
g had a big value in liberating people from the general feeling of apathy, inactivity, and ineffectiveness which seriously depressed and worried a large number.… This new feeling is frequently reflected in verbatim material today, comments like ‘We’ll soon be doing something.’ ‘I’m prepared to do anything.’ ‘Well, everyone’s in it now.’”

  Nearly sixty years later a historian may attempt to sum up two general impressions. One is that on 23 May the majority of the British people did not know how catastrophic the situation of their army was. The other is that their confidence in Churchill was something of a new element, beginning to have something of an effect. Still, there can hardly be a better summation than the last sentence of the “Morale Today” report of 19 May: “‘Outwardly calm, inwardly anxious’ covers the general tone of today.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Friday, 24 May

  Hitler’s halt order. – The Germans before Dunkirk. – Calais. – Hitler and the Conservatives. – The two Rights. – Chamberlain. – Appeasers. – Halifax. – The War Cabinet. – Churchill and Roosevelt.– The Bntish press. – “A slight increase in anxiety and a slight decrease in optimism.”

  Early on the morning of 24 May Hitler left his headquarters on the edge of Germany and flew to see General Karl Rundstedt at Charleville on the western bank of the Meuse. This was unusual, since it was Hitler’s custom to retire late and to rise late (it seems that the last time he had got up early was on 3 September 1939, the day of the British and French declarations of war on Germany). What he wanted to discuss with Rundstedt was obviously important. It involved the rapid progress of the German armies encircling the Allied army in Flanders and Belgium, pushing the latter to the remaining ports on the Channel, where Boulogne had already fallen, where the siege of Calais was about to begin, and where General Guderian’s armored troops were but fifteen miles to the south of Dunkirk, having crossed their widest obstacle, the Aa Canal, in two places. But there were dangers to consider: Guderian may have advanced too quickly. About this Hitler and Rundstedt seemed to agree. At 11:42 that morning the order went out: Guderian’s advance must be temporarily halted.