by John Lukacs
This non-realisation is of course characteristic of every unpleasant impact on the mass of the population.
A cartoon from Punch: “Meanwhile, in Britain, the entire population, faced by the threat of invasion, has been flung into a state of complete panic.”
The subsequent analysis reported that “better off and better educated” people were, on the whole, more pessimistic, if only because of their knowledge of geography across the Channel. At the same time the Belgian surrender brought out expressions of “some wild recrimination” against the Belgian king and even, in one or two instances, against America, mostly among the less-educated classes. “As a result, the implications of the position are not as yet fully realised. Yesterday, concern for the B.E.F. was vague and personal. Today there is a growing realisation that the B.E.F. might be forced to surrender if things came to the worst. In some cases this is felt acutely.”
Tuesday, 28 May, was the first instance of such a widespread realization. And yet: “There is an unusual lack of real worry as yet today. A strong section still openly express complete confidence, though in the past few days talk about the inevitability of our victory as a walkover has steadily declined. This does not mean that people are not taking the situation seriously, but rather that it had not yet fully sunk in, and the tendency to more stable opinion (due to good leadership) noticed during the last day or two has caused people to hold themselves in check.”
The overall accuracy of these reports and assessments of public opinion and popular sentiment generally accord with whatever records we have of personal recollections of the diaries of that day.5 By coincidence, George Orwell began to keep a war diary on this very day, 28 May: “This is the first day on which newspaper posters are definitely discontinued.… Nevertheless of the early Star’s eight pages, six are devoted to racing.… I hope the B.E.F. is cut to pieces sooner than capitulate. People talk a little more of the war, but very little. As always hitherto, it is impossible to overhear any comments on it in pubs etc. Last night E [Eileen, his wife] and I went to the pub to hear the 9 o’clock news. The barmaid was not going to have turned it on if we had not asked her, and to all appearances nobody listened.”6
Orwell did not attribute this self-conscious reserve either to stupidity or to torpor. Two days later he wrote: “It is seemingly impossible for them to grasp that they are in danger, although there is good reason to think that the invasion of England may be attempted in a few days, and all the papers are saying this. [Cyril] Connolly says they will then panic, but I don’t think so.”7
On 28 May Evelyn Waugh took a day off from his post and went to London: “Arriving there I found the news of Belgian surrender on the streets together with women selling flags for Animal Day.’ … Went to Ministry of Information where Graham Greene propounded a scheme for official writers to the Forces and himself wanted to become a Marine.… I said the official writer racket might be convenient if we found ourselves permanently in a defensive role in the Far East, or if I were incapacitated and set to training. Returned to find the camp in great despondency. The Commanding Officer went to Aldershot and was told to prepare the troops for the blackest news of the BEF and to keep up their morale.”8 Harold Nicolson’s policy committee met in the morning to discuss the Belgian news: “From the purely cynical point of breaking the news to the British public this is not so bad a thing. It will at least enable them to feel that the disaster was due to Belgian cowardice as indeed to some extent it was.” Later that evening Nicolson had to make a statement in the House of Commons about the Ministry of Information’s budget estimates: “It is a strange feeling to stand at the box which Gladstone struck. I am not nervous in the least and barely conscious of anything but the job in hand, but were it not for this dull pain of war, I should have regarded it as a great moment in my life.”9
The previous night Nicolson had agreed that the whole system of war communiqués “must be altered and that we cannot possibly starve the public in this way.” On 28 and 29 May this showed some results: some of the war reportage in the newspapers became less absurd. Still, much of the news was misleading or strange. On the opinion page of the Daily Express of 28 May appeared “serious news”: “The news is grave. It grows graver every hour. There can be no pretence about the serious position of the B.E.F. in Belgium, and the French and Belgian troops with them.” (This after the Belgian surrender.) Yet the leading article in the Daily Mail was tided “Faith in Weygand”: “We still wait for Weygand. We await the moment for counter-attack.” Six days after the last feeble attempt of anything like a counterattack, this made no sense at all. A headline in the Daily Mirror: “3 RAF Aces Bag 100” (?).
One of the strangest tendencies was an encouragement of optimism about Russia — evident, independently from one another, in items in at least three newspapers. (This had a precedent in 1914, when Britain was swept by rumors about troops of their ally Russia arriving in England: people were supposed to have seen some of them with snow on their boots.) It was Halifax’s idea to accord with Sir Stafford Cripps’s wishes and name him ambassador to the Soviet Union (a disastrous choice, but that would not become evident until much later).10 The Daily Mirror on 28 May printed editorials optimistic about Russia: “We have nothing to lose and everything to gain by a trade agreement and a pact of friendship with the Soviet Union” In the News Chronicle: “Russia is certainly showing no desire at the moment to help Hitler wage his war.” This was incorrect; it showed the kind of wishful thinking (and wishful writing) that would be characteristic of at least a section of the British press after Hitler’s invasion of Russia and thereafter. On the same day the Manchester Guardian printed yet another cartoon by Low: Stalin listening carefully but willingly to Cripps, who appears as a British salesman, knocking and opening the Kremlin door—another instance of very wishful thinking. (Soon V. M. Molotov, on Stalin’s orders, would congratulate Hitler on the occasion of the German triumph over France.)
In the same Manchester Guardian: “Blackburn Mills combing, spinning and weaving yesterday at 6 A.M., instead of 7:45.… The working week is now one of 55½ hours.” “Weavers at Messrs. Taylor at Hartley’s Industrial Mills at Westburton, near Bolton, have refused to work with a conscientious objector (even though he volunteered for A.R.P. Service).” There was a considerable evidence of suspicion of aliens, too. In the News Chronicle, 28 May: “Finchley Council decided last night to dismiss the 40 aliens in Finchley civil defense” In the Daily Mail’s “Mail Bag”: “Hundreds of readers write demanding ‘much more stringent treatment of aliens’” Yet at the same time the Amateur Boxing Association cancelled that year’s championship at Wembley Pool, “now a refugee centre.” And in the News Chronicle, “Answer to Hitler: The Care of Polish Refugee Children in England.” And now an (Edwardian) period piece: “Lady Dudley’s Escape.”11
It is at this time that a brief, and necessarily incomplete, survey about the contemporary impressions of foreign observers, including refugees, may be warranted. These impressions cannot, of course, be pinpointed to the day of 28 May; they involve, rather, their reactions to the British atmosphere during the last week of May; my rapid survey of the published dispatches, memoirs, and other papers of foreign ambassadors and ministers are gleaned from that period. They were better informed than were foreign newspapermen stationed in London; the reports of the journalists of that time are not particularly interesting. We must keep in mind that the impressions of such highly placed observers are often valuable (a practice that goes back to the instructions and achievements of the ambassadors of the Venetian Republic in the sixteenth century, who were told that their thoughtful observations and their gathering of all kinds of information might be even more important than their practices of negotiations).
Generally speaking, most ambassadors and ministers posted in London were Anglophiles; many of them were sympathetic to the new Churchill government. The exception, as we have seen, was Joseph P. Kennedy, the American ambassador (a disastrous appointment by Roosevelt, who ha
d thought that this posting of an Irish-American politician to London was a political masterpiece). So much has been written about Kennedy since then that it is easy to sum up his inclinations. He hated Churchill; he thought that the structure of the British Empire and of British society was hopelessly antiquated; he believed that National Socialism and Fascism, and Germany and Italy, were much preferable to Communism and Russia, indeed were probable bulwarks against Russia. In sum, in May 1940 (and for some time thereafter), Kennedy was a defeatist; but then Roosevelt (as well as Halifax and the Foreign Office) knew that, which is why Kennedy’s personal messages to Roosevelt were without much effect.12 The French ambassador, Charles Corbin, was deeply pessimistic, aware of the fraying ties between London and Paris; his dispatches to his government were entirely preoccupied by that matter and give few clues to his views about British morale and opinion.13 The Italian, Bastianini, was torn — or, rather, was navigating carefully—between his long-standing loyalty to Mussolini and his sympathy for what Halifax was attempting, but by 28 May he knew that the decision for war had been made in Rome. Even so, his dispatch to Rome three days later gave a perceptive account of British morale: for the first time in a week, it was definitely “up.”14 The Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, was a sly personage who had for some time cultivated his relations with Churchill and the Churchillians, an approach that the latter rather unjustifiably attributed to pro-British inclinations — none of which appears in his dispatches sent to the Kremlin at the time. Franco’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s was the Duke of Alba, an aristocrat descended from ancient British bloodlines. In May 1940 Alba’s sympathies for Churchill were not yet evident, but in his case, unlike those of some other Spanish diplomats of that period, sympathies for Germany were entirely absent. At the end of May the Danish and Belgian ministers were in a very difficult position, the former still representing a government now under German control, the latter (Cartier de Marchienne, an antique diplomatist from another age), in a most frightful dilemma between loyalty to his king and loyalty to the Belgian government, which had fled to France and was denouncing the king’s capitulation. The Polish minister, Count Edward Raczynski, was splendidly resolute. Among the neutrals the ministers of Sweden (Björn Prytz) and of Hungary (György Barcza) not only were Anglophiles but were much impressed by Churchill, and—as were other foreign observers, too — by the discipline and patriotism of the people, including the upper classes, who during the last ten days of May seemed to have accepted drastic restriction of their personal liberties and even more drastic governmental confiscations of many of their foreign assets and investments and much of their taxable income, all without a murmur.
In these last days of May 1940 Britain harbored more than 100,000 refugees, while more of them were still arriving from France. We have seen that there was considerable popular distrust of aliens. This, together with the prevalent anxiety about possible spies and so-called fifth columnists, contributed to the government’s decision to corral refugees who had come from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, interning them on the Isle of Man. This was not done for the recently arrived and currently arriving refugees from Holland, Belgium, and now from France: the French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk were generously treated by both government and population. One of these, the fine French historian Marc Bloch, one of the first coming from Dunkirk, was much impressed by the calm and resolute discipline of the British, especially in contrast to the confusion and irresolution of French officials whom he encountered a few days later when he shipped back to France to continue in the war. The scattered reminiscences of Central European refugees, many of them Jewish, tell us little about their impressions of Britain in May 1940: they were fearful about their own future, naturally enough, and the stolidity of their hosts at times confused and distressed them. As in most other cases, their reminiscences of Britain later that summer and during the Blitz are more telling, and sometimes inspiring.
Those with some information on this day, 28 May, were still pessimistic about Dunkirk. Alexander Cadogan was present at the War Cabinet that morning. Later that day he wrote in his diary: “Prospects of the B.E.F. blacker than ever. Awful days!”15 General Pownall, Gort’s chief of staff, had some interesting thoughts about the relative caution of the Germans: “It is true that we have not had to bear the same weight or attack that was brought to bear on the others, And is it entirely by accident that the German stops when he meets us and tries to get success elsewhere, where there may be a gap, or a place defended by one or other of our allies?”16 Four years later Pownall felt compelled to write: “I shall not ever forget my feelings during the black fortnight in May, 1940, when the capture or annihilation of the entire B.E.F. seemed almost inevitable. I do not yet know how that came to be avoided.”17
Churchill himself did not think that more than fifty thousand could be lifted from Dunkirk. That morning he drafted a stern directive, marked “Strictly Confidential”: “In these dark days the Prime Minister would be grateful if all his colleagues in the Government, as well as important officials, would maintain a high morale in their circles; not minimising the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve to continue the war till we have broken the will of the enemy to bring all Europe under his domination. No tolerance should be given to the idea that France will make a separate peace; but whatever may happen on the Continent, we cannot doubt our duty, and we shall certainly use all our power to defend the Island, the Empire, and our Cause.”18 Churchill also minuted to General Ismay early that morning. Among other things he wrote: “If France is still our ally after an Italian declaration of war, it would appear extremely desirable that the combined Fleets, acting from opposite ends of the Mediterranean, should pursue an active offensive against Italy.… The purely defensive strategy contemplated by the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean [Andrew Browne Cunningham] ought not be accepted.… Risks must be run at this juncture in all theatres. I presume that the Admiralty have a plan in the event of France becoming neutral.”19
“Churchill himself did not think that more than fifty thousand could be lifted from Dunkirk…” The BEF arrives home, a throng of helmeted men joining the many thousands more returning to England.
We have no evidence that his enemy Hitler knew anything about the difficulty with Halifax in the War Cabinet, but Hitler still thought and hoped that the British would see the light, as he put it. That morning an important dispatch from the British ambassador to Japan, Sir Robert Craigie, was shown to the War Cabinet. The pre vious day he had met the Japanese foreign minister at lunch, who had asked Craigie “for a private talk”: “He enquired whether I do not think that Germany would soon make further peace proposals.… I think [the Japanese minister] asked for our talk particularly to convey above information, which must have reached him from some German source. I should like to encourage him in such confidences,” wrote Craigie. “I did not, however, like to question him too closely as [to the] nature of actual proposals for fear of encouraging belief that we might be prepared to listen to them.”20
The War Cabinet met at half past eleven. Most of the business dealt with the Belgian surrender. (Unlike the French and most of the British press, Churchill was not sharp in condemning King Leopold: “No doubt history would criticise the King for having involved us and the French in Belgium’s ruin. But it was not for us to pass judgment on him”) Duff Cooper, the minister of information, then pressed “for a frank statement of the desperate situation of the British Expeditionary Force. He feared that, unless this was given out, public confidence would be badly shaken and the civil population would not be ready to accept the assurances of the Government of our ultimate victory.” Churchill said that that afternoon he would make a statement in the House of Commons about what was happening in and around Dunkirk. But, he added, “it would be idle to try to forecast the success of this operation at this stage.”21
Then — and this is significant—Churchill had a private talk with Chamberlain. He
asked Chamberlain whether he would agree to invite Lloyd George into the government. Both of them knew that Lloyd George was, to put it simply, defeatist; that a few years before he had spoken of Hitler in the most admiring terms; and that only a few months earlier he had said openly in Parliament that Hitler’s peace offers must be considered seriously.22 Both also knew that Lloyd George hated Chamberlain — which was why, out of loyalty, Churchill had to consult Chamberlain. This was the second time that Churchill had written to Lloyd George. (We have seen that as early as 13 May he had offered him the post of minister of agriculture.) Now Churchill wrote him again, but laying down the condition that the War Cabinet, including Chamberlain, must be unanimous in such an invitation. The letter was sent the next day.23 Lloyd George refused the offer. He would not work with Chamberlain. Of course Churchill’s main purpose was not only the strengthening of national confidence but also that of national unity. But there was also another matter behind this: if worse came to worst, … And would worse come to worst? Churchill was statesman enough to think about that too.
He went back to Admiralty House, where he had a brief lunch. He had prepared a brief statement to make in the House of Commons. He had not appeared there for a week, but he thought that such a statement about the war situation must now be made. He told the members the details of the Belgian capitulation. Again he chose (after some deliberation) not to attack the Belgian king: “I have no intention of suggesting to the House that we should attempt at this moment to pass judgment upon [him].” But the Belgian government, after fleeing to France, had disassociated itself from the king and proclaimed its continuation in the war. About that, Churchill said, “whatever our feelings may be upon the facts so far as they are known to us, we must remember that the sense of brotherhood between the many peoples who have fallen into the power of the aggressor, and those who still confront him, will play a part in better days than those through which we are passing.” Then he turned to what everyone was concerned with, the British at Dunkirk: “The troops are in good heart, and are fighting with the utmost discipline and tenacity, and I shall, of course, abstain from giving any particulars of what, with the powerful assistance of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, they are doing or hope to do. I expect to make a statement to the House on the general position when the result of the intense struggle now going on can be known and measured. This will not, perhaps, be until the beginning of next week.” (That was so: his next appearance in the House was on 4 June, after the close of the Dunkirk chapter. It was the second of his most memorable speeches, with the stirring passage that began, “We shall fight on the beaches …”) Now he ended with a fine Churchillian fillip: