Five Days in London, May 1940

by John Lukacs

  There were, however, differences between Halifax and Churchill on various occasions. During the Reluctant War Halifax was willing to listen (though without committing himself) to various unofficial mediating proposals from all kinds of interlopers. He still had some hope in Goering as a possible successor to Hitler. This did not mean that Halifax was slipping back to appeasement. His principal reason—or at least so he said, on occasion — was to gain time before the full force of the war broke over Britain irrevocably. On 6 May he made an oblique remark in the cabinet, to the effect that “one way to gain time was to delude the Germans by peace talk.”35 The idea of “peace talk” stung Churchill to fury. This was high treason, he said. Halifax wrote him immediately: “You are really very unjust to my irresponsible ideas. They may be silly, are certainly dangerous, but are not high treason. I dislike always quarrelling with you! but most of all on ‘misunderstood grounds.’” Churchill answered instantly, on the same paper: “Dear Edward. I had a spasm of fear. I am sorry if I offended. It was a vy. deadly thought in this atmosphere of frustration. You cd. not foresee this. Forgive me. W.”36 This was a satisfactory exchange between two old-fashioned gentlemen. The quickly penned phrases and even the handwriting reflect rather well the personal characteristics of their writers. However, as Roberts judiciously puts it, “One has to piece together the evidence for Halifax’s relationship with Churchill with care” — and not only because Halifax had “weeded his papers thoroughly.” “Many more discussions between Churchill and Halifax took place, particularly in and around cabinet time, than were recorded or recalled.”37

  The inclination to seek compromises, the profound dislike of anything overstated or overwrought, were characteristic of Halifax, not of Churchill. There was more to this than a difference in tactics or perhaps even the difference in their temperaments. Churchill probably understood Halifax better than Halifax understood Churchill, the latter condition having had something to do with Halifax’s unwillingness to ponder Churchill’s thinking thoroughly. It seems that he thought not only that some of Churchill’s proposals or statements were excessive or extreme but that they were superficial. In short, he was ambivalent about Churchill, distrusting him in some things, admiring — or at least respecting — his power in others. There is plenty of evidence for this ambivalence soon after Churchill became prime minister. On 11 May Halifax congratulated Churchill in warmest possible terms. (First sentence: “I know how great is the burden that you have courageously taken upon yourself.” Last sentence: “I need not tell you how wholly my thoughts & wishes are with you in the leadership it now falls to you to give us all. God bless you always.”)38 Yet on the same day Halifax wrote to his son, an MP, “I hope Winston won’t lead us into anything rash.”39 There are numerous references critical of Churchill in Halifax’s culled diaries during these days. Did Halifax “simply calculate that he would be in a more powerful position standing behind the throne than sitting on it”? Perhaps. He thought that Churchill might not last long. Halifax wrote in his diary on 11 May: “I have seldom met anybody with stranger gaps of knowledge, or whose mind worked in greater jerks. Will it be possible to make it work in orderly fashion? On this much depends.” He added, “Certainly we shall not have gained much in intellect.” On 12 May: “Uneasy about Winston’s methods.” On 13 May: “Certainly there is no comparison between Winston and Neville as Chairman.” The same day, in a letter: “I don’t think wsc will be a very good PM though I think the country will think he gives them a fillip.” “He’s an odd creature.” On 14 May: “This makes me mistrust his judgment more than ever.” That day he used the then-current (here and there) term “gangsters” about Churchill’s new crew: “The gangsters will shortly be in complete control.” Yet in the same diary, on 10 May, about Churchill: “He has acted with great public spirit.” On 17 May: “I am much impressed with Winston’s courage.” Finally, on Friday, 24 May: “I had a talk with Winston before dinner; as always he is full of courage.”40 But he was getting ready to confront him in the War Cabinet.

  Halifax still took considerable pleasure from his friendship with the king and queen. On 20 May, walking through the gardens of Buckingham Palace (to the gate of which he had his key from the queen) : we “found ourselves enmeshed in a little party on the Lawn, consisting of the King and Queen and the Gloucesters, with whom we had a drink and talk!”41 On 22 May, Leo Amery, a Churchillite, made a speech at Oxford, about which he recounted: “I thought of saying something by way of warning against the Hitler peace offensive but … [the speech was] sent round to Edward [Halifax] who toned it down to something so weak that it almost looked like an invitation to Hitler to offer terms of peace on which we might run out.”42

  The time has now come to describe the War Cabinet. After 10 May 1940, the War Cabinet consisted of five men — Churchill, Halifax, and Chamberlain and the two leaders of Labour, Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, who were brought into the coalition, making it a National Government. Sometimes other members of the Outer Cabinet, or high military men, were invited in. Present, too, at times was the cabinet secretary, Sir Edward Bridges; but now and then he was briefly excluded from the room because of the secrecy of the matters being discussed, which happened during the cabinets of 26 and 27 May.

  After the tenth of May, even though he had become prime minister, Churchill chose not yet to move into Downing Street. His rooms were in Admiralty House, where some of the War Cabinet meetings were held, though most of them took place at 10 Downing Street, on the upper floors of which Neville Chamberlain and Mrs. Chamberlain still resided. The Cabinet Room was (and still is) on the ground floor of No. 10, at the end of a long corridor. This was a relatively new arrangement. The larger part of No. 10 Downing Street was built in the late seventeenth century. During the nineteenth century “No. 10” became a password, though not all of the prime ministers chose to live there then. During the twentieth century all of them have done so, except for Churchill during the first months of his prime ministership (and except for Tony Blair now). In 1937 Mrs. Chamberlain, who liked living there, chose to rearrange some of the rooms, mostly on the ground floor.43 There is a good description of the Cabinet Room in Ian Colvin’s The Chamberlain Cabinet, a book dealing with 1937-38: “The Cabinet Room, long, narrow and lofty with a table at least twenty-five feet in length, surrounded by sabre-legged and leather-upholstered chairs, had been extended in 1781 with the aid of two Corinthian pillars.” There are some nice candlesticks and cut glass on the table, two mantlepiece clocks, and a fine tall-case clock; in the 1930s there were also bookcases and telephones. “A portrait of Sir Robert Walpole by Van Loo hung over the marble fireplace, in front of which the Prime

  “The Cabinet Room, long, narrow and lofty with a table at least twenty-five feet in length, surrounded by sabre-legged and leather-upholstered chairs…’”

  Minister’s armchair and inkstand marked the centre of the table.… The tall shuttered windows of the Cabinet Room look out over the low garden wall of Number 10, through plane trees on the Horse Guards Parade and St. James’s Park.” Outside the red baize door, “in the ante-room, brass-framed labels indicated where each Minister might hang his hat.”44

  It would seem, at first sight, that Churchill had a comfortable majority in the War Cabinet, not to speak of the Outer one: even if Chamberlain and Halifax were to oppose him, the two Labour ministers would support him, three to two, at worst. This was so, but it only went so far. Attlee and Greenwood were newcomers in the cabinet, and their experience in military and world affairs was limited; besides, they represented a party that was very much of a minority in Parliament. In May 1940 they listened rather than spoke (especially Attlee) in the War Cabinet. A real break between Churchill and the two eminent Conservatives would have been disastrous. Had Halifax or Chamberlain or both resigned, there would have been a national crisis, immediately reverberating in Parliament, and Churchill’s position would have been gravely damaged, perhaps even untenable.

  On Friday, 24 May, the
War Cabinet met at 11:30 A.M. Most of the discussion involved Calais, about which Churchill talked at some length. It appears that he was not yet informed about Hitler’s halt order. There was, for the first time, mention of Dunkirk: “Considerable numbers of French troops were in Dunkirk, but no English troops had as yet been sent there, with the exception of certain small units sent back to this area from the B.E.F. The port was functioning quite well.”45 Then Halifax brought up the Belgian crisis: there was more discussion about whether preparations should be made for King Leopold III and his family to depart for England, as the queen of Holland and her entourage had done twelve days earlier. Halifax said yes, Churchill, not yet. But there was no real conflict between them on this point.

  Neither Churchill nor Halifax knew of a significant development in Washington that day, 24 May. Since the beginning of the war Churchill had had a secret correspondence with President Roosevelt. Halifax knew this and approved it. But — and this is important—as late as mid-May 1940 Roosevelt was not yet confident about the worth of Churchill’s leadership. He had received differing reports about Churchill’s character, not all of them positive.46 There was, too, his ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, who, as we have seen, hated Churchill and thought that England had no chance of (or reason for) resisting Germany. Roosevelt had begun to be aware of Kennedy’s defeatist tendencies; so had Halifax. But more important was the startling nature of the message that Churchill had composed and sent to Roosevelt on 15 May. This was the first revelation of Churchill looking ahead into the abyss, of his recognition that he might be cast aside if Britain were compelled to sue for peace. (Note how early—this is the afternoon of 15 May—Churchill envisages the possibility of France falling.) “As you are no doubt aware, the scene has darkened swiftly,” he wrote. “If necessary, we shall continue the war alone and we are not afraid of that. But I trust you realise, Mr President, that the voice and the force of a United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.” The italics are mine.

  Roosevelt answered Churchill’s message twelve hours after its receipt. His tone was friendly, but he did not promise much. Two days later Churchill acknowledged Roosevelt’s response in a short letter of five sentences. “We are determined to persevere to the very end whatever the result of the great battle raging in France may be.… But if American assistance is to play any part it must be available soon.” Another two days later, on the twenty-first, Churchill drafted another letter. He hesitated whether to send it. In the end he did. He felt compelled to impress upon Roosevelt the awful prospect of what might happen. His government might go down in battle, “but in no conceivable circumstances we will consent to surrender.” But:

  If members of the present administration were finished and others came in to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants. Excuse me, Mr President, putting this nightmare bluntly. Evidently I could not answer for my successors who in utter despair and helplessness might well have to accommodate themselves to the German will.

  Churchill ended, “However there is happily no need at present to dwell upon such ideas.”

  Happily no need? Perhaps the prospect of such ideas was unthinkable, but the unthinkable must sometimes be thought about, and the time had come to give it at least some thought. Roosevelt and others in Washington did not realize this fully or even adequately. Roosevelt’s trust in and friendship with Churchill were not yet strong enough. There was still a distance between their minds. For almost another month no important messages would pass between them.

  Meanwhile a dangerous fracas broke to the surface in London. A member of the American embassy there, the code clerk Tyler Kent, was a convinced isolationist. Not unlike some American isolationists and at least some Republicans, his extreme dislike of Franklin Roosevelt went hand in hand with his anti-Communism and pro-German worldview. He had taken hundreds of classified documents, including secret messages from Churchill to Roosevelt and vice versa, from the American embassy and hoarded them in his home near Baker Street. He passed some of these to a handful of people, mostly women who hated Churchill and who were German sympathizers, some of the papers then going on to a few British Fascists and even to Italian agents. On 20 May British security police broke into the room of this Baker Street Irregular. Then his diplomatic immunity was waived. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. (At the end of the war he was released and returned to the United States.) It is interesting to note that there was nothing unconstitutional in the contents of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence. It was fortunate that Roosevelt’s ambassador Kennedy, whose political preferences were similar to Kent’s, chose to wash his hands of Kent and would not insist on his immunity. Kennedy the politician chose not to break with Roosevelt before the 1940 election campaign; he did not think that this was the right occasion or the right time to cause open trouble for Roosevelt.47

  On 23 May Churchill informed the War Cabinet that the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand had sent a secret and urgent telegram suggesting that in view of the gravity of the situation, the Dominion governments should severally address appeals to President Roosevelt for the release of every available aircraft and that they should also appeal for American volunteer pilots. Churchill’s reply was that he “should not recommend a public appeal at this moment, for it would give the President an impression of weakness.”48 That evening Kennedy met with Halifax. Kennedy was utterly pessimistic about England’s chances and volubly critical of Churchill. He sent a message to Roosevelt in the same vein. Roosevelt was inclined to listen to his friend William C. Bullitt, the American ambassador to France, who had already suggested (on 16 May) that there was the possibility not only of a French but of an eventual British surrender, in which event the British ought to move their fleet to Canada.

  This was in accord with Roosevelt’s views. He had begun to realize the swiftness and the gravity of events. Even before his unprecedented attempt at a third term of office, he was beginning to think, somewhat as the British on 10 May had, of a national coalition government. He had talked to his 1936 presidential opponent, Alfred Landon, about this, though as yet without results. Now, on the morning of 24 May, he contacted the prime minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, asking him to send a secret representative to Washington to discuss “certain possible eventualities which could not possibly be mentioned aloud.” On the telephone King was referred to as Mr. Kick, Roosevelt as Mr. Roberts. King thought that the United States was “trying to save itself at the expense of Britain” and told Roosevelt that he should talk about that to Churchill directly.

  Roosevelt’s idea (and request) was that Canada and the Dominions should press Churchill to send the British fleet across the Atlantic, the sooner the better—that is, before Hitler’s peace terms could include the surrender of the fleet. Roosevelt added that Churchill should not be told of the American origin of that proposal. Thus Roosevelt himself had come to realize that Britain might have to sue for peace — that is, surrender. Also, he did not quite — yet —trust Churchill.

  Of this Churchill — and Halifax — were unaware.

  So, too, were the people of Britain largely unaware of the immediacy of the dangers that faced them. This relative unawareness was reflected in the press. This is significant, since even during the war there was considerable freedom of the press in Britain. When it came to secret or sensitive matters the government would rely much less on peremptory state censorship than on the habitual self-censorship of the newspapers’ editors and of their reporters. The historian who wishes to reconstruct from the British newspapers the public opinion of the period may find plentiful illustrations of daily life
from various small news items, programs, advertisements, and so on, as the layout and the contents and the very character of British newspapers hardly differed from their makeup before the war; however, as purveyors of the kind of news that was otherwise not available, say, on the radio, the newspapers told little. Only here and there can we find in the newspapers items that reflect expressions or tendencies of public opinion not recorded elsewhere. We shall come to one or two of these in a moment.

  Meanwhile, the newspapers’ reportage and comment on the grave and dramatic military events in France and Belgium were generally wanting. About this there was no great difference between the more detailed and highbrow “class” newspapers such as the Times or the Daily Telegraph on the one hand and the popular newspapers on the other. On 24 May the editorial in the Evening Standard was perhaps unusual because of its somber warning to prepare for the worst: “First let us have no ostrichism in our preparations against an invasion of this island. There are still some who scorn the idea. Can Hitler succeed where Napoleon failed? No, they say, the Channel is impregnable, just as others told us some weeks ago that the Meuse was impregnable. We would do better to prepare for the worst.” The editorial of the News Chronicle was sober: “In his brief statement on the war situation yesterday the Prime Minister made it clear that the tide of German penetration into Belgium and Northern France has not yet been stemmed.” Yet it also printed a headline, “French Troops at Suburbs of Amiens,” which was, unfortunately, far from the truth. In the same number the renowned military expert Liddell Hart wrote that bombing power now made it difficult, if not impossible, “to maintain a bridgehead” on a Channel port (fortunately he was to be proved wrong, about Dunkirk at least). A G. G. S. Salusbury, war correspondent of the Daily Herald, was very wrong: “Britain and France are unbeaten. The main French armies, the main British armies, have not yet been seriously engaged.” The Manchester Guardian praised the French “Aged Commanders,” Weygand and Pétain: they had their “coevals in years among the great figures of history.” Weygand was seventy-three, but the Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice had led his army into Constantinople when he was ninety-five. Marshal Pétain was eighty-four, but then Gladstone (still hero of the liberal Manchester Guardian) was still prime minister at eighty-four, and “if (as M. Reynaud tells us) Marshal Pétain is to stay in office until victory had been won he may outlast Gladstone’s record.” Yet the Manchester Guardian’s editorial that day was good: “Vigilance. German arms roll nearer to us every day.… Morale is not preserved by closing the eyes. Too much had been lost in this war already by refusals to believe that certain things could happen.” There is a prewar, if not Edwardian, touch in the programs announced by the Manchester theaters for the week following 24 May: The Chocolate Soldier in the Opera House. Gaietés de Montmartre in the Gaiety Theatre. (In the two large movie theaters, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Destry Rides Again, with Marlene Dietrich.) The main article in the Daily Telegraph was written by J. B. Firth, a historian and biographer of Cromwell. Its tone was Churchillian: “Now is the time for the British people to show the stuff of which they are made and the heights to which they can soar.… Hitler’s peace propaganda before the war was directly designed to spread terror.… Duty calls us to close ranks at home against the slightest sign of national disunity.” Was this whistling in the dark? Perhaps not. The “London News and Comment” section of the Scotsman declared on 24 May, “The confidence of the Londoner remains unshaken by the news from France, even though it is graver.”49