Five Days in London, May 1940

by John Lukacs

  22. A letter to the editor of the News Chronicle from an A. B. Young, Tunbridge Wells: “Now is the time to bring back Lloyd George and place him in the War Cabinet. His appointment would bring comfort and strength “

  23. FR142.

  24. FR159.

  1. Allingham, The Oaken Heart, 188,189.

  2. FR 159. However, this does not accord with the retrospective report (above, p. 161) to the effect that the pessimism to optimism ratio was highest during the dates 28 to 30 May.

  3. FR 159. However, an earlier and eventually famous Low cartoon, “All Behind You, Winston” (showing a grim and resolute Churchill, with rolled-up sleeves and clenched fist, marching in front of a great crowd of people doing the same, including Chamberlain and Halifax), had had a considerable effect: Dalton mentioned it to Churchill, who reacted with obvious pleasure at the end of the Outer Cabinet meeting on 28 May.

  4. FR1”.

  5. About the distinctions of public opinion from popular sentiment see above, p. 29. No such distinctions among these obviously overlapping though still different phenomena appear in the Mass-Observation and Ministry of Information reports. Their usage of the term “public opinion” includes their registrations of popular sentiment.

  6. He continued this diary until 28 August 1941 and resumed it again from 14 March to 15 November 1942.

  7. In Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, 340-41, 342.

  8. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, 470-71.

  9. Diary, unpublished, in Balliol College, 46.

  10. These two men, on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, were bound by their personal sympathies: Cripps, like Halifax, was a religious puritan of sorts — dyspeptic, ascetic in his habits, and a Yorkshireman.

  11. “One of the last persons to get on board ship when Boulogne was evacuated under fire was the Dowager Lady Dudley, known to so many of your elder readers as Miss Gertie Miller of the Gaiety. Lady was at her villa at Le Touquet [so was Wodehouse] where she usually spends the spring. Her first appearance on the stage was as the girl babe in the pantomime at the St. James’s Theatre Manchester, in 1892.” Compare this with the episode recounted by Orwell on 30 May: “Connolly related that recently a ship was coming away from northern France with refugees on board and a few ordinary passengers. The refugees were mostly children who were in a terrible state having been machine-gunned, etc. Among the passengers was Lady — who tried to push herself to the head of the queue to get on the boat, and when ordered back said indignantly, ‘Do you know who I am?’ The steward answered, ‘I don’t care who you are, you bloody bitch. You can take your turn in the queue.’ Interesting if true” (Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, 2:341).

  12. However, Churchill and Roosevelt were aware of Kennedy’s potential political influence, which is why they continued to transmit their correspondence through the American embassy in London, occasionally spicing them with a few positive phrases about Kennedy. They wished to avoid letting him feel that they were bypassing him because they distrusted him. But, as the summer went on, Kennedy knew that he was being bypassed, and he complained bitterly to Roosevelt. In October he returned to the United States and then resigned.

  13. One member of his staff, the diplomat and writer Paul Morand, who had been posted there because of his impeccable knowledge of English and English things, had a low estimate of the British ability to resist and survive. This very cultured and originally very Anglophile personage had gradually become deeply disillusioned in the 1930s by what he saw as a decline, if not a degeneration, of earlier British virtues and qualities. After the French armistice he joined the Pétain regime, ending up as the Vichyite minister to Romania.

  14. Documenti diplomatici italiani, series 9, vol. 4, 522.

  15. Cadogan, Diaries, 291.

  16. Pownall, Diaries 1:352.

  17. He wrote this on 1 April 1944, in faraway Burma (ibid. 2:158).

  18. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, 91-92.

  19. CA 20/13.

  20. FO 371/24407.

  21. CAB 65/7, WM 144.

  22. After meeting Hitler in 1936 he compared Mein Kampf the Magna Carta and called Hitler “the resurrection and the way” for Germany (Roberts, The Holy Fox, 69).

  23. Lloyd George’s papers in the Library of the House of Lords, G/4/5/48. In June, Lloyd George said to his secretary that he was “not going with this gang. There will be a change. The country does not realize the peril it is in.” On 6 June Churchill tried again, after having consulted Chamberlain as well as Halifax. But Lloyd George again refused.

  24. Hansard, 28 May 1940.

  25. Bringing up Vansittart’s name may have been a calculation on Halifax’s part. It is true that Vansittart had had good relations with the Italians, going back well before 1940. At the same time he was known as being extremely anti-German.

  26. This was neither “clear” nor fair to Reynaud.

  27. CAB 65/13, WM 145.

  28. Dalton Diary; see Chapter 1. We have one other account of what Churchill said, in the diary of Leo Amery: “Winston told us the whole story very clearly and dramatically in no way minimising the extent of the disaster or of further disasters which might follow such as a successful march on Paris or a French surrender.” (In an added handwritten footnote by Amery: “He told us he did not expect to get more than 50,000 away from Dunkirk”) “One thing he was clear about was that there could be no greater folly than to try at the moment to offer concessions to either Italy or Germany, the powers which were out to destroy us. There was nothing to be done at any rate until we have turned the tide, except fight all out” (Amery, The Empire at Bay, 619).

  29. CAB 65/13.

  30. Though, as a sop to Reynaud: “… without excluding the possibility of an approach to Signor Mussolini at some time, we cannot feel that this would be the right moment” (CAB 65/13. 235 Dipp. 28 May 1940). Yet “the effect on British morale, now resolute, would be dangerous. The situation could only be improved by showing that we still have stout hearts and confidence in ourselves.… If we both stand out we may yet save ourselves from the fate of Denmark or Poland” (Bell, A Certain Eventuality, 17: CAB 65/13, WM 145th conclusions).

  31. Roberts, The Holy Fox, 226.

  32. “In October 1942, Sir Orme Sargent wrote Halifax about the way the events of 25 to 28 May ought to be portrayed in Sir Llewellyn Woodward’s official history of the war. Halifax, who as early as February 1941 had shown disquiet about this, replied with a staggering lack of candour. He asserted, ‘There was certainly never the idea in mind of HMG then or at any time of asking Mussolini to mediate terms between them and Germany,’ and went on to imply that it had been solely neutrality from Italy and never mediation with Germany that had been the subject of the Bastianini conversation and subsequent Cabinet discussions.… Halifax insinuated that the most Britain had been willing to offer Italy was a seat on the board of the company which administered the Suez Canal. ‘The holy Fox’ could hear the hounds baying for his reputation, but he could lay only the faintest of false trails.

  “He was not alone. Churchill wrote in Their Finest Hour how, ‘Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda.… We were much too busy to waste time upon such academic, unreal issues’ In fact, future generations might find it just as noteworthy that there were five meetings [in reality, nine], some of which went on for as long as four hours, solely on that very subject” (ibid., 227-28).

  1. Many people may have said, “At least Communism was defeated. And was that such a bad thing?”

  2. Here I must question the almost always unexceptionable and often brilliant Andrew Roberts, in the conclusion of his biography of Halifax: “The oft-repeated assertion that had Halifax become Prime Minister instead of Churchill ‘we might have lost the war’ is as hypothetical as it is hyperbolical. Churchill would still have been running the operational side, with Halifax pr
oviding the political leadership. History would have been denied morale-boosting speeches from No. 10, and Halifax might have been relegated to ‘honorary’ Prime Minister, but Britain would not have lost the war as a result” (Roberts, The Holy Fox, 308). I am not sure of this.

  3. The record shows that he had the First Lord, A. V Alexander, for lunch. During the afternoon an applicant for another household maid was being interviewed. He asked Chamberlain and Mrs. Chamberlain to dinner next night. During the day, too, came a handwritten note from the Treasury, an answer to Churchill’s inquiry about his salary as prime minister, including his income tax reduction. It would be £1,737, 12 shillings and 7 pence (Churchill Diary, CA).

  It was on this day that Churchill began to affix his later-famous slips of paper, with the phrase “Action This Day,” on some of his orders.

  4. PREM 4/22/3.

  5. General Ismay at the War Cabinet that morning: “The French were disinclined to retire, but Lord Gort was urging them to come back as the British could not wait for them” (CAB 65/13, WM 146).

  6. Churchill to Ismay, CA 20.13. In a later letter to the prime ministers of the Dominions about the air fighting over Dunkirk, Churchill wrote that Dunkirk was a sort of no-man’s-land.

  7. “It brings me to the fact that the Bosches may equally well be able to land men in England despite the bombing. Had the Germans had any Navy they might have upset our embarkation. What have their submarines been doing?” (The Ironside Diaries).

  8. His first rationalization occurred on 2 June, recorded by General Halder’s representative at Hitler’s headquarters: there was “a slight difference between Italy and Germany. Italy’s main enemy had become England. Germany’s main enemy was France,” and the British would soon be ready for a “reasonable conclusion of peace” (Halder’s War Diary, cited in Lukacs, The Duel, 105).

  9. Documenti diplomatici italiani, 1939-1943, series 9, vol. 4, 520.

  10. In his great speech on 4 June, Churchill was not as fair to Leopold III as he had been on 28 May. (The London correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, 30 May: “There has been a generous impulse, surprisingly general, to leave King Leopold to his conscience and to history”)

  11. PREM 3/22/13.

  12. CAB 65/13, WM 146.

  13. Cadogan, Diaries, 292, 293.

  14. Lukacs, The Duel, 144.

  15. “Stock Exchange Not Dismayed.”

  16. The widely known columnist William Hickey: “To the English people, Leopold’s surrender was as incredible as it was disquieting”; “in a teashop I heard a woman say, plaintively: ‘But he was such a nice-looking boy.’ In an expensive grill-room I heard a man say: ‘I’m terribly shocked about it. He was at Eton.’”

  17. “London consistently shows more anxiety … than the provinces” (FR159).

  18. “I find a passionate letter from the French Ambassador saying that our Press is putting all the blame on the French Army. [This was not so.] … We hope to improve the situation.… The work is urgent and cumulative as during the Paris Peace Conference. But then we were happy in those days and not in a state of fear” (The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, 91). In his unpublished diary entries, Nicolson records meeting the American correspondent Vincent Sheean that night: “an absolute worshipper of Winston Churchill. He is going to devote all the influence he has to bringing America to our assistance. He says our greatest danger is that the isolationists are now concentrating upon the argument that it is too late for them to help England.”

  19. Cited in Lukacs, The Last European War, 417. This is not the gloomy fatalism that we get from the recollections of Leonard (and of Virginia) Woolf: “We also crammed as much social life as possible into our four days, having many of our friends for dinner. For instance, in the two London visits of May 21-24 and June 4-7 we saw T. S. Eliot, Koteliansky, William Plomer, Sybil Colefax, Morgan Forster, Raymond Mortimer, Stephen Spender, Kingsley Martin, Rose Macaulay, and Willie Robson.

  “There was in those days an ominous and threatening unreality, a feeling that one was living in a bad dream, and that one was on the point of waking up from this horrible unreality into a still more horrible reality.… There was a curious atmosphere of quiet fatalism, of waiting for the inevitable and the aura of it still lingers in the account of our days in London which Virginia gives in her diary” (Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, 53-54)•

  20. Allingham, The Oaken Heurt, 255.

  21. Brittain, England’s Hour, 41.

  22. Gilbert, Companion Volume, 187 n. 1.

  23. Pownall, Chief of Staff 2:359. Note, however, Churchill’s habit of openly speculating and frankly discussing the most important matters within his circle. Sir Edward Bridges: “In this sort of discussion he would keep nothing back. He would express the most outspoken views … or about the various ways in which the situation might be expected to develop” (Action This Day, 22-23).

  24. Lukacs, The Duel, 103.

  25. 30 May, after a cabinet: “Winston was in a combative and discursive mood. I have never seen so disorderly a mind. I am coming to the conclusion that his process of thought is one that had to operate through speech. As this is exactly the reverse of my own, it is irritating.” 19 June: “It is the most extraordinary brain, Winston’s, to watch functioning that I have ever seen, a most curious mixture of a child’s emotion and a man’s reason.” 24 June: “Winston’s garrulousness…” (Halifax Papers, A. 7.8.4). These diaries are weeded. His correspondence with his wife, who disliked Churchill, is still kept in a sealed hamper in the Muniment Room, Garrowby. On 5 July Halifax said to Victor Cazalet that Churchill was getting to be arrogant and impatient: “It’s almost impossible to get five minutes of conversation with him” (Gilbert, Companion Volume, 483-84).

  26. Lukacs, The Duel, 132-33, also 150-51.

  27. CA, 20/2.

  28. The Second World War Diaries of Hugh Dalton, 767. Contrast this with Churchill in October 1943, as recorded by Pownall, Chief of Staff 2:109-10: Churchill “thoroughly dislikes the Russians and their ways and is under no illusions about them. They are doing what they are doing (and very well too) to save their own skins. Their future policy will be entirely to suit themselves and nobody else will count. All the more necessary, of course, to keep along with the U.S.”

  29. Halifax Papers, A.7.7.18. Churchill then telephoned (on 14 March) to Lady Halifax; he was grateful for the suggestion but couldn’t do it: “It would be ‘the whipped cur coming to heel,’ and like going to see Hitler just before the war.”

  30. This phrase, or designation, appears in one of the biographical footnotes in A. J. P. Taylor, English History.

  31. The statistics from a public opinion survey, “Approve or Disapprove of the Prime Minister,” were as follows: Chamberlain, November 1939, 68 percent; January 1940, 56 percent; 9-10 May 1940, 32 percent. For Churchill: July 1940, 88 percent; disapprove, 7 percent; don’t know, 5 percent.

  32. See the developing exchange of communications between him and Churchill through that summer in Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence. This important and unique collection (they exchanged more than two thousand letters during the war, in addition to their often unrecorded telephone conversations) is marred by some of the egregious comments (“Headnotes”) by the editor, Warren F. Kimball. For example, about their exchange on the crucial days of 14-15 June, Kimball writes that Churchill, “distraught, … found it necessary to warn Roosevelt that Great Britain could not be expected to fight on alone without any real hope of American military intervention. His threat that a pro-German government might replace his Ministry was the first and one of the very few times that Churchill ever strayed from his usual strategy of emphasizing Britain’s willingness to fight to the bitter end.” It was not said for the first time; it was not a threat but a warning of something that had to be kept in mind; and it did not represent Churchill “straying.”

  33. Charles de Gaulle, War Memoirs, 62-63.

  34. Henrey, London Under Fire,
15.

  35. From Raleigh, English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century, 70.

  36. Pownall, Chief of Staff, 368-69.

  37. Surely not as wrong as the German refugee writer Franz Borkenau, whom Orwell quoted in his wartime diary: “Franz Borkenau says England is now definitely in the first stage of revolution” (341).

  38. Cited in Smith, The English Reader, 120.