Five Days in London, May 1940

by John Lukacs

  26. FR138.

  27. The Diary of Virginia Woolf 287, 288: “Today’s rumour is the Nun in the bus who pays her fare with a man’s hand.”

  1. On 19 May an extraordinary ceremony took place in Paris. The dignitaries of the agnostic Third Republic gathered in the cool vault of Notre Dame.

  2. CAB 66-7 [W.P. (40) 168; also C.O.S. (40) 390]. Bell, A Certain Eventuality, 31: “a euphemistic wording regularly used in such papers in place of a direct reference to a French collapse.”

  3. This assumption — very much mistaken—was predominant in the Board of Economic Warfare. “Its main activities are recorded in a number of reasonably honest, though regrettably bland, official publications, such as W. N. Medlicott’s The Economic Blockade (London, 1952), whose first sentence reads: ‘Too much, it is now agreed, was expected of the blockade in the Second World War.’ Indeed, Great Expectations reigned, at least on paper, in the Bleak House of the London School of Economics where the new ministry had its home at first.… [But then] Chamberlain’s war strategy, too, rested on his trust in the efficacy of the blockade; he ‘did not believe that the enemy could face a second winter.’ … [Yet] until the middle of 1944 the German economy had no general difficulties in providing its war materials” (Lukacs, The Last European War, 232-33).

  4. Bell, A Certain Eventuality, 50.

  5. C.O.S. 40 (391), not identical with 390.

  6. CAB 65/13 WM 139.

  7. Cadogan, Diaries, 290. (Late on Saturday night Gladwyn Jebb had met with Paresci.) Bastianini was “timid” because he feared Mussolini, who had already instructed his ambassadors in London and Paris and Washington not to engage in substantial negotiations. There is no record of his short conversations with Halifax on Sunday, unless it is subsumed within the report he drafted about their talk on the previous day — which may have been the reason of the relative lateness of his summary dispatch to Rome. See above, p. 93.

  8. Villelume, Journal d’une défaite, 356. Alexis Léger, the secretary-general of the Foreign Ministry, inclined to Churchill. This did not matter much, though somehow it was made known to the arch-appeaser Horace Wilson, whom Churchill had thrown out of Downing Street a fortnight before and who had then written that “Léger was violently anti-German, equally violently anti-Italian, and he must bear much of the responsibility for the failure to take advantage of the opportunities offered from time to time, by either Hitler or Mussolini for some kind of rapprochement.” That would come to Churchill’s attention in October 1941, when he was threatened by another potential collapse, that of the Russian army. Horace Wilson Papers, CAB 127/158.

  9. See below, pp. 116-17,120.

  10. CAB 65/13, WM 140.

  11. “Equilibrium”? See below about Halifax and the Peace of Amiens, pp. 125-26.

  12. The italics are mine. See also Esnouf, “British Government War Aims and Attitudes”: “These were strong words for the normally mildly mannered and spoken Halifax, and they show both the depth of his feeling and the danger of the policy which he could see Churchill was determined to pursue” (225).

  13. CAB65/13 [WM139].

  14. CAB 66/7 [W.P. (40) 170].

  15. Three days earlier Halifax saw Joseph Kennedy, who was utterly pessimistic about England’s chances and, as usual, contemptuous of Churchill. Kennedy wrote Roosevelt in the same vein.

  16. G. N. Esnouf: “Indeed these two matters, of an approach to buy off Italy and one to induce Mussolini to mediate with Hitler, were closely linked despite their separate motives and ramifications. Because of this, the Cabinet discussions of both matters were often intertwined, so that it is not always clear from the minutes which proposal is being referred to. Yet to distinguish between them is crucial. Buying off Italy facilitated the war against Germany, Italian mediation meant its end, such was the enormity of the discussions of 26 to 28 May” (“British Government War Aims and Attitudes,” 223).

  17. Cadogan, Diaries, 290.

  18. Esnouf cites an unsigned note by Churchill of 26 or 27 May, in Churchill’s handwriting, in PREM 3/174/4,11-3: the Italian move would lead “to an armistice and conference under the conditions of our being at Hitler’s mercy.… Such a conference would only end in weakening fatally our power to resist the terrible terms which will almost certainly be imposed, if not upon France, at any rate upon Britain.”

  19. How did they know this? In 1940 and for some years before, both the Italian and the British secret services were able to decrypt and read many of each other’s documents. Yet such a suggestion from Hitler to Mussolini could hardly be extracted from Hitler’s letter of 25 May (see above, p. 95) •

  20. Chamberlain Diary, NC A 24/2.

  21. Quoted in Dilks, “The Twilight War.”

  22. See Dalton, above, p. 5. Many supporters of Churchill suspected that Chamberlain, rather than Halifax, was irresolute.

  23. Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 37.

  24. “Which is, too, why the Anglophobe phrase ‘perfidious Albion’ is incorrect” (Lukacs, The Duel, 89).

  25. The text is not in the Halifax Papers in York but in the Churchill Archives, Cambridge.

  26. It may be argued that this statement was even more Canningite than Castlereaghian.

  27. In this respect it is curious to note that it was Churchill who, because of his concern with the European balance of power, was vocal about the threat of German armament and potential aggression as early as 1933, whereas Halifax and the appeasers, even much later, were not.

  28. On 6 April 1940: “I still adhere to my view that [Mussolini] is going to bark more than bite” (Halifax Papers, A.7.8.3). Halifax was wrong.

  29. Lawlor, Churchill and the Politics of War, 75,60.

  30. Lloyd George, after meeting Hitler in 1936, called him “the greatest living German.” In October 1939 Lloyd George said openly in Parliament that Hitler’s peace offer must be considered seriously. Hitler commented in one of his wartime “Table Talks,” in 1942, that Churchill’s “real opponent was Lloyd George. Unfortunately he is twenty years too old.”

  31. The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, 121. See also Lukacs, The Duel, 95: “His spirit was not broken, but the prospect of a British Götterdämmerung was before his eyes.” “At times of stress, Churchill often recalled some particular quotation that expressed his feelings. On May 26 he asked John Martin [one of his secretaries] to look up for him a passage in George Borrow’s prayer for England at Gibraltar. [George Borrow was the wonderfully eccentric English travel writer of the early nineteenth century; his classic book was The Bible in Spain.] Martin gave it to Churchill the following day, and, as he later recalled, ‘it matched his mood.’ The quotation read: Tear not the result, for either shall thy end be a majestic and enviable one, or God shall perpetuate thy reign upon the waters’” (Sir John Martin, letter to Martin Gilbert, 24 October 1982, quoted in Gilbert, Finest Hour, 406).

  32. The first quote is from Diaries and Letters of Harold Nieokon, 87-88; the second is from the unpublished excerpts of the diary (typed by Nicolson) in the library of Balliol College.

  33. No. 9, INF 1/264 Monday, 27 May 1940.

  34. FR142,27.5.40.

  35. A footnote in that report: “It may be noted that yesterday gasmask carrying was at the highest noted for many months, 19.6% in the morning, and 20.3% in the afternoon definitely carrying their masks, as compared with e.g. 13.2% on the 16th, and 8.7% on the 17th last week. (Counts taken at standard points and by standard technique.) “

  36. John Betjeman, “In Westminster Abbey,” Collected Poems (1979)•

  1. There is a record of twenty-six thousand noncombatants lifted off from Dunkirk on 26 May: a contemporary guess rather than an accurate figure, since precise statistics begin only on 27 May.

  2. Churchill Papers, CA 20/14. It is dated 27 May, but this must be wrong: the message still speaks of fighting in Calais, and it ends: “Anthony Eden is with me now and joins his good wishes to mine” — surely a reference to their dinner on 26 May. Also, in his dispatch Churchill still
suggests a British attack southward from the Dunkirk perimeter (“A column directed upon Calais while it is still holding out might have a good chance”); this was both unreasonable and impossible.

  3. Goering himself on 27 May: “Only a few fishing boats are coming across; one hopes that the Tommies know how to swim” (cited in Engel, Heeresadjutant bei Hitler.)

  4. CA 20/14.

  5. There is a parenthetical addition in the minutes after Chamberlain’s unexceptionable statement: “(This statement would apply of course to the immediate situation arising out of the hypothetical collapse of France. It would not mean that if at any time terms were offered they would not be considered on their merits.)” This insertion is not clear. Did “terms” mean terms offered to France or to Britain? Both the typescript and its place in the minute suggest that it was added subsequently by the secretary.

  6. This was shrewd foresight, though only partly true. What was true was that twenty-four days later, after the complete collapse of France, Hitler chose to offer terms to France that gave the latter a constrained way out of the war—which was why Sir R. Campbell, then the last British ambassador to France, would call them “diabolically clever.” But these terms were of course much harsher than Churchill had imagined on 27 May: the Germans retained the entire Channel and Atlantic coasts of France, with all the French ports there.

  7. The wording of this telegram reflected Halifax’s often convoluted and cautious phraseology. It suggested that Roosevelt address Hitler directly: “If you … say to Hitler that, while you recognize his right to obtain terms that must necessarily be difficult and distasteful to those whom he defeated, nevertheless terms which intended to destroy the independence of Great Britain and France would at once touch the vital interests of the U.S., and that if such insisted upon, you thought it inevitable that the attempt would encounter U.S. resistance, the effect might well be to make him think again. If you felt it in the event contemplated to go further and say that, if he insisted on terms destructive of British independence and therefore prejudicial to position of U.S., U.S.A. would at once give full support to G.B., effect would of course be all the more valuable” (Halifax Papers, A. 410.4.1, cited in Roberts, The Holy Fox, 212).

  8. CAB 65/7, WM 141.

  9. Cadogan, Diaries, 290.

  10. That was as far as he went. Nearly sixty years later there are different shades of interpretations about this cabinet session. Andrew Roberts, in his biography of Halifax, writes that the compromise put forward was Churchill’s, not Chamberlain’s. He is right in saying that when Halifax tried to pin Churchill down, he “took advantage of Churchill’s attempt to be as moderate as possible, the better to sell his policy to the War Cabinet, and in particular to carry Chamberlain with him”; “Halifax was angry at the way Churchill twisted and misrepresented his arguments. … He was incensed by the way Cabinets, which were designed for sober and mature reflection, had instead to hear harangues in which romanticism and illogicality vied for the upper hand” (The Holy Fox, 220-21). There is a slight element of exaggeration in his otherwise balanced judgment. David Dilks, citing Churchill’s last statement “that while he would not join France in asking for terms, he would be prepared to consider them if told of them,” adds: “Here was Churchill, of all people, prepared to think of a peace which would inevitably leave Germany master of Europe and would also involve the loss of some British territory. The traditional belief that Churchill, from the moment of his accession as Prime Minister, was determined to fight until the whole of Europe was liberated can no longer be sustained in pure form” (Dilks, “The Twilight War and the Fall of France”). This is exaggerated: the issue, certainly at the end of May 1940, was the survival of an independent Britain; moreover, Churchill had never fought for the whole of Europe, not in 1940 nor later. I am more inclined to accept the calm and reasoned summary of Philip Bell: “The War Cabinet discussions of 26, 27, and 28 May marked a decisive point in British history, and by implication in the history of Europe. There can be no doubt that if the War Cabinet had agreed to the French proposal, and approached Mussolini with a view to mediation, they would not have gone back on that decision. Once the possibility of negotiation had been opened, it could not have been closed, and the government could not have continued to lead the country in outright defiance of German power” (A Certain Eventuality, 48).

  11. CAB 65/13, WM 142. Early that morning the British ambassador in Washington, Lothian, reported that he had talked with Roosevelt, who, “thinking aloud,” repeated his idea that the British navy, in the event of a German victory, should sail to Canada and that the royal family should remove to Bermuda, since “the American republic may be restless at monarchy being based on the American continent” (WM 142, Appendix).

  12. Cadogan, Diaries, 291. “H. came to have tea in my room after. Said he had spoken to W, who of course had been v. affectionate! I said I hoped he really wouldn’t give way to annoyance to which we were all subject and that, before he did anything, he would consult Neville. He said that of course he would and that, as I knew, he wasn’t the one to take hasty decisions.”

  13. See above, pp. 65-66.

  14. Halifax, who, as we saw, wrote nothing about this episode, still wrote in his diary that night: “I thought Winston talked about the most frightful rot, also Greenwood, and after bearing it for some time I said exactly what I thought of them, adding that, if that was really their view, and if it came to the point, our ways must separate. … I despair when [Churchill] works himself up to a passion of emotion when he ought to make his brain think and reason” (Halifax Diary, 27 May 1940). This obviously shows that Halifax was not convinced by Churchill. However, we must consider, too, that his diary was written principally—indeed, exclusively—for his family. It was not a political diary, although it seems that the above was more than an outburst of bitterness; he may have wished to state his position (if that is what it was) with a view to the future. At the same time it may be significant that his own reconstruction (“I said exactly what I thought of them”), including his threat of resignation, does not figure in the War Cabinet record of the session. About this Roberts, The Holy Fox, 221, is probably right: “[Halifax’s] threat on 27 May had a strong effect on Churchill, who could not afford to see his Government so publicly, swiftly and fundamentally split, especially on what was bound to be publicly perceived as the issue of peace or war. Of course Halifax knew this too, rendering the exercise more of a warning shot than a serious intention to go.”

  15. CAB 65/7, WM 143 (40).

  16. “[Reynaud] was, I thought, rather yellow at the gills.… He added that he himself would go on to the end, but that he could not disguise the fact that if the Germans really advanced on the Seine others, ready to negotiate, would replace him. … I have located the nigger in the fence [sic] as far as Reynaud is concerned, the pessimist who, fat and sly, sits next door to him, pouring defeatism in his ears. It is Lt.-Col. de Villelune [sic], his private military adviser, in whom he has great confidence. … If [Villelume] is half as dishonest and furtive as he looks, he has Fagin beat by furlongs.… The French people are not angry yet. They are resolute and calm but bewildered” (PREM 3/188/6).

  17. Colville, The Fringes of Power, 140.

  18. The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 23. “On 27 and 28 May Roosevelt learned from Kennedy and from Knox’s Chicago Daily News bureau in London that a part of the Cabinet was talking about the possibility of a negotiated peace” (Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 115). (How did such second-line American newspapermen in London know something that the British newspaper owners themselves did not know, or of which they were hardly aware?)

  19. A rapid note to his wife from his office in the Ministry of Information: “I am afraid that the news this afternoon is very bad indeed, and that we must expect the Germans to surround a large portion of our army and occupy the whole area of Belgium and Northern France. We must also face the possibility that the French may make a separate peace, espec
ially if Italy joins in the conflict. … I think you had better keep this to yourself for the moment” (The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, 90).

  20. Astor Papers, 1416/1/2.

  21. “The Peaceful Inn,” by Dennis Ogden (George Orwell, in his diary on 31 May, called it “the most fearful tripe.” The interesting point was that although the play was cast in 1940, it contained no reference, direct or indirect, to the war). Also “Portrait of Helen,” by Audrey Lucas, and “The Tempest,” with John Gielgud and sets by Oliver Messel, and “Ghosts,” by Ibsen. “‘Dr. Brent’s Household’ by Edward Percy, will open at Richmond.” In the Times of 27 May appears an interesting letter to the editor from Clive Bell (a Bloomsbury personage) from Charleston: “I bought a newspaper described as ‘Sports 4th Edition.’ It consisted of eight pages, six of which were devoted to horse- and greyhound-racing. … If the Government does not stop racing of all sorts for the duration of the war, its demands on the life, labour and property of all citizens will hardly be taken seriously.” On the other hand, Harold Nicolson, in his unpublished diary on 24 May, observed: “Up to Leicester where there is a huge dinner of the 1936 Club. I get a very excellent reception and find that their morale is very good. It is not mere complacency since I give them a test question to vote on, namely, ‘should the Derby be put off?’ They voted some 88 per cent in favour of postponement.”