by John Lukacs
Returning to June 1940, let us now make a fast run through the great events of the summer, during which Churchill rose to be the savior of England.30 On 4 June Dunkirk fell to the Germans. Six days later Mussolini declared war. Another week later France capitulated to Hitler. The latter still hoped to hear promising news from England. There was none. The British people were now fortified by Churchill’s leadership and by his words.31 On 16 July Hitler issued his somewhat cautiously phrased directive to prepare for the invasion of England. Three days later he made his long-prepared victory speech, in which he made a last proposal for peace to England while attacking Churchill in violent terms. There was no response from London. On 31 July Hitler summoned his generals, telling them to prepare for a war against Soviet Russia. There was more method than madness in that decision. He said that England had only two hopes, America and Russia. Against America he could do nothing. But if Russia were eliminated, England’s last hope for a possible ally in Europe would vanish, and the Americans would have their hands full with Japan.
On that very day, 31 July, Franklin Roosevelt began to move. Before the end of July he was not sure that Britain would hold out; if not, the New World would receive the British fleet.32 Now he prepared to skirt Congress and offer fifty old destroyers to Britain, a drastic departure from American neutrality. This was announced on 2/3 September, exactly one year after Britain had gone to war with Germany. Meanwhile, the Battle of Britain went on in the air. The Germans did not defeat the British fighter force. On 7 September Hitler ordered the switching of the air offensive to the bombing of London. On 16 September he postponed the invasion project. Four days later he corralled the eager Japanese into an alliance expressly directed against the United States. On the last day of the year President Roosevelt announced the Lend-Lease Act in support of Britain, stating that the United States was henceforth the arsenal of democracy.
London was now the capital of freedom, the fountain of hope for millions of Europeans who listened night after night to the broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Corporation. That inspiring condition would last throughout the war. But long before the end of the war it began to appear that the price of victory over Hitler would be a different England and a different civilization—and not only because Britain had no chance of winning the war alone. The germs of these developments were already latent in the first days of June.
On Sunday, 9 June, Charles de Gaulle flew to London for the first time. “The English capital had a look of tranquillity, almost indifference. The streets and parks full of people peacefully out for a walk, the long queues at the entrances to the cinemas, the many cars, the impressive porters outside the clubs and hotels, belonged to another world than the one at war.” His conclusion was not optimistic: “The mass of the population had no idea of the gravity of events in France. … It was plain, in any case, that to English minds the Channel was still wide.”33 Elegant London may have disappointed de Gaulle, yet (yes, the Channel was still wide) the reactions (and the memories) of many Englishmen and Englishwomen were not disappointing. Mrs. Robert Henrey remembered those early days in June: “London is always a joy to walk back into, … its colouring so vivid that it blinded me. How elegant the women in Fortnum and Mason! How numerous the expensive cars in Piccadilly.”34 Mrs. Henrey took heart from this. So did many others; foreigners and Anglophiles, whether in England or not: they saw the elegance and the untroubled calm as a living symbol of a Western high bourgeois civilization, representing the very antithesis of the heavy brutality incarnated by Hitler and his Germans.
Then France fell. As early as March 1938 General Pownall cited the words of Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century: “Whensoever the last day of the Kingdom of France cometh it will undoubtedly be the event of the destruction of England.”35 On 16 June 1940 Pownall wrote in his diary: “In London it can be hardly said that people are cheerful, there’s little enough to be cheerful about. But they are calm and resigned to the probability that when Hitler was finished with France he will turn on England. They don’t realise of course what it means to be ‘turned on’ by the power of Germany.” Next day he wrote: “As nations we have got fat and lazy. We possessed great Empires, earned for us by the sweat and blood of our ancestors, that we would not take sufficient care to defend. Hitler has at least inspired the spirit of self-sacrifice in his nation—with us there is no such spirit of service.… Democracies are inefficient, in war and in preparation for war, compared to autocracies; add to this the sapping of morale which democracy brings with its pandering to the public and its competition for votes.”36 He thought that the lines from Henry VI, part I, act I, scene I, are “strangely apt”:
GLOUCESTER. Is Paris lost? Is Rouen yielded up? …
EXETER. How were they lost? What treachery was used?
MESSENGER. No treachery, but want of men and money;
Among the soldiers, this is muttered—
That here you maintain several factions,
And whilst a field should be despatched and fought,
You are disputing of your generals:
One would have lingering wars, with little cost:
Another would fly swift, but wanteth wings:
A third man thinks, without expense at all,
By guileful fair words peace may be obtained.
Awake, awake, English nobility!
In more than one way, these Shakespearean lines were “strangely apt.” But Pownall was too pessimistic about the effects of the fall of France and perhaps about democracy too. A very different man from Pownall was George Orwell. He, too, was not inspired by what Mrs. Henrey saw. Later that year Orwell wrote that “the lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goering’s bombing-planes.” He may have been wrong.37 Yet in 1940 Orwell’s patriotism (and his traditionalism) rose to tower high above his democratic class-consciousness. In 1944, in “The English Class System” he wrote, “It is significant that in the moment of disaster the man best able to unite the nation was Churchill, a Conservative of aristocratic origins.” (It is no less significant that in 1947 Orwell gave the name Winston Smith to his hero in 1984, that Winston was born and so christened in 1945, and that in his first act of revolt against darkness and oppression, Winston Smith raises his glass and toasts the Past.)
“Conservative” and “aristocratic”: we must, for the last time, consider these adjectives. Beaverbrook—another man very different from both Pownall and Orwell — recalled in a speech in 1964: “We were so ill-prepared. Our peril was beyond comprehension. Churchill, after taking office, said to me: ‘We will come through in triumph but we may lose our tail feathers’”38 More than tail feathers — but perhaps that is not the point. The “reactionary” Churchill (and that was how such different men as Halifax and Hitler saw him) was both more and less conservative than were many men of his party. He was both more and less aristocratic than were some of his British critics, many of whom may have thought that without tail feathers there can be no respectability. Chips Channon, who fervently supported Chamberlain and who distrusted and disliked Churchill, wrote in his diary on the night of 28 May, when Churchill had had his way: “I think there is a definite plot afoot to oust Halifax, and all the gentlemen of England, from the Government and even from the House of Commons.”39 All the gentlemen of England … We have seen that there were not a few people, perhaps especially among the Conservative members in the House, who thought that Churchill was not quite a gentleman. They sat on their hands in May, not much inclined to applaud Churchill. Even in June the silence of many of the Tories was “sinister.” It was not until July that the majority of the Conservative members of Parliament thought it best to express their loyalty to Churchill.40 They had been elected in 1935, most of them Chamberlainites in 1937 and after, convinced that they represented respectable opinion in England. Respectability was the key. (Someone who knew them both once said to me: “I respected Halifax more than I liked him,” but “I respected Churchill less than I liked him”)
The deep-seated conservatism of the British people — as distinct from the political and social conservatism of the Conservatives — was a great asset in 1940. The great majority did not know — more precisely, they were hardly able to conceive — that Britain might lose the war. Within their patriotism (it was old-fashioned patriotism, rather than modern nationalism) there was of course an element of their pride as well as their sense of history. We can see some of this in a moving diary entry written by a sensitive middle-class woman on 5 June: “This morning I lingered over my breakfast, reading and rereading the accounts of the Dunkirk evacuation. I felt as if deep inside me there was a harp that vibrated and sang—like the feeling on a hillside of gorse in the hot bright sun, or seeing suddenly, as you walked through a park, a big bed of clear, thin red poppies in all their brave splendour. I forgot I was a middle-aged woman who often got up tired and also had backache. … It was a very hot morning and work was slowed a little, but somehow I felt everything to be worthwhile, and I felt glad I was of the same race as the rescuers and rescued.”41
The British people did not know how antiquated was the condition of their country when compared to that of Germany in 1940. This was so not only with regard to the armaments of the two nations or their military tactics; it was also so with regard to the structure of their societies. The traditions of British democracy and the British system of classes were old; compared to them the institutions and also the developing social structure of Hitler’s Germany, of his populist folk-state, were more modern.42 The conditions of British industry and finance, British habits and fashions and customs of communication, British modes of behavior and thought, were still old-fashioned, in the literal sense of that adjective. It is not sufficient to attribute these conditions to the national weariness or to the languid decadence that followed the First World War. There were many late-Victorian or Edwardian habits, physical and mental, extant in 1940. So were many of the sounds and smells and sights: organ music in the cinemas, coal smoke, flowered frocks on the greenswards, the tastes of strong tea and weak cocoa, Anglican clergymen in gaiters, club silence and pub talk. From examining some of the private letters of the times — not only their contents but their very paper and often their handwriting — one gets the sense of a place and an age that is old. The shock of May-June 1940, together with Churchill’s leadership quality, then produced a wonderful fillip of national unity and hard work and discipline. But 1940 was still, the end of an entire age — or, rather, the beginning of its end.
Churchill saw Hitler and his Reich as incarnating something evil and dangerous, some of the brutal sources of which may have been very old but some of which were also alarmingly new. And his vision was such that he turned out to be the savior not only of England but of much else besides — essentially, of all Europe. He was very much aware of this. On 28 May he spoke “of the world cause to which we have vowed ourselves.” On 14 July he declared that Britain was fighting “by ourselves alone, but not for ourselves alone.” London “was this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilisation.” In 1941, in a broadcast to the United States: “In these British Islands that look so small upon the map we stand, the faithful guardians of the right and dearest hopes of a dozen States and nations now gripped and tormented in a base and cruel servitude.” That concern with Europe had been one of the main differences between the vision of Churchill and that of Halifax and indeed of most Conservatives.43 Memories of his ancestor Marlborough and the Edwardian elements in his character may have moved him. But there was more to it than that. Churchill did not for a moment believe that Britain and the Empire could continue to exist across from a Europe entirely dominated by Germany. If the price of survival of British independence and British democracy was the eventual transference of much of the imperial burden to the Americans, so be it; and if the price of winning the war was the tacit acceptance of Russian over-lordship over much of Eastern Europe, that was unavoidable, too: for half of Europe (including of course all of Western Europe) was better than none.44
So much for his vision — and for his strategy. That much we can see in retrospect. But it is important to recognize that this was the essence of his vision and of his strategy even in May and June 1940, when a British-inspired and British-managed liberation of Europe was not in the cards. To the contrary: that was the moment when not only his domestic opponents but many of the defeated peoples of Western Europe were inclined to accept the collapse of parliamentary democracy and seek some kind of accommodation with the triumphant Third Reich. This was not only the case with King Leopold and Marshal Pétain; there was a moment when many, perhaps most, of the elected parliamentary representatives of Holland and Belgium and Denmark and, of course, the French Republic were moving in that direction. That state of affairs would soon — at the latest by October 1940 — pass, because England was holding out, because of Churchill. His phrases about London having become the custodian of Western civilization were not mere rhetoric: there was the presence of the exiled kings and queens of Western Europe in its mansions, there was the colorful presence of their uniformed soldiers and sailors in its streets (including the brave Poles, thousands of them); there were those Bach concerts in its darkened Victorian halls — and the British Broadcasting Corporation’s signal opening its European broadcasts with the first bar of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
A half-century later a new generation of Churchill’s critics has appeared, some of them critical of his vision, some of his resolution, some of both. Eschewing extreme or pro-Nazi representatives, we have the works of such professional historians as Maurice Cowling or David Reynolds or Sheila Lawlor or John Charmley (the latter enthusiastically supported by Alan Clark). This is not the place to describe or analyze their writings in detail, but the essence of their revisionist criticism may be summed up as follows: that Churchill had no plan in May 1940 except to keep fighting, hoping that something might turn up (Micawber-like), though he hardly knew what;45 and that Churchill’s obsessive hatred of Hitler may have blinded him, for had he accepted an accommodation with Hitler by 1941 at the latest, the Empire might have been saved. This argument has been presented, too, by certain German historians, especially Andreas Hillgruber,46 who was determined to argue that Churchill’s principal aim was the destruction not only of Hitler but of Germany, an unconscionable imperialist policy with lamentable results. That many Germans have no liking for Churchill may be understandable. But is it justifiable? Who else stood in Hitler’s way in 1940 — and who was committed to the restoration of law and democracy in Western Europe, including Germany?
I began this last chapter, entitled “Survival,” with this sentence: “Had Hitler won the Second World War we would be living in a different world.” And now, at the end of this chapter, indeed of this small book, I must change its tone and end with a fortissimo. At the end of May 1940 and for some time thereafter, not only the end of a European war but the end of Western civilization was near. Churchill knew that, inspired as he was by a kind of historical consciousness that entailed more than incantatory rhetoric. Here are two examples. On 31 May, when he had flown to Paris and had impressed at least Reynaud by the strength of his resolution, he also said, near the end of their meeting: “If Germany defeated either ally or both, she would give no mercy; we should be reduced to the status of vassals forever. It would be better far that the civilisation of Western Europe with all of its achievements should come to a tragic but splendid end than that the two great democracies should linger on, stripped of all that made life worth living.” Nineteen days later, when France fell, he struck the same tone and theme. If Hitler wins and we fall, he said, “then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and care for, will sink into the abyss of a New Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
These italics are mine. Churchill understood something that not many people understand
even now. The greatest threat to Western civilization was not Communism. It was National Socialism. The greatest and most dynamic power in the world was not Soviet Russia. It was the Third Reich of Germany. The greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century was not Lenin or Stalin. It was Hitler. Hitler not only succeeded in merging nationalism and socialism into one tremendous force; he was a new kind of ruler, representing a new kind of populist nationalism. What was more, the remnants of the older order (or disorder) were not capable of withstanding him; indeed, some of their conservative representatives, in Germany and elsewhere, were inclined—for many reasons, including their fear of Communism — to accommodate themselves to him. It was thus that in 1940 he represented a wave of the future.47 His greatest reactionary opponent, Churchill, was like King Canute, attempting to withstand and sweep back that wave. And — yes, mirabile dictu — this King Canute succeeded: because of his resolution and — allow me to say this — because of God’s will, of which, like every human being, he was but an instrument. He was surely no saint, he was not a religious man, and he had many faults. Yet so it happened.