Five Days in London, May 1940
Page 24
39. Cited in Lukacs, The Duel, 100.
40. Roberts, in Eminent Churchillians, about the Tories versus Churchill: “The tale has therefore to be pieced together from scraps among hundreds of public and private sources. When it is, the picture which emerges is radically different from the accepted Tory version” (138). They hate “the wild man” (160). Even after July 1940, and unlike what many historians had written: “the Tory Party was still suspicious of him” (183).
41. Nella’s Last War, 62.
42. One startling and shocking evidence of this was the general failure of the evacuation of children from London at the start of the war (the government project in view of possible air raids). More than a million workingclass children were sent to middle-class homes in the country, often with their mothers. “The scheme has now [this was written in the late spring of 1940] frittered away, and the sociologist’s job is to record what happened.… As it is, thousands of hosts in reception areas are disgruntled and would be unwilling to experiment with further visitors, and thousands of mothers have gone back to the danger zones with their minds made up never to return” (War Begins at Home, 296). One M-O observer: “The gulf between middle-class hosts and workers’ child-evacuees is somewhat unbridgeable; the utter destitution of some children [many of them liceridden and verminous] evokes horror among the middle classes. In one case a woman was driven mad by the vile filth and disease of two children. It is doubtful if she will recover” (312). Another: “The main drawback of the evacuation scheme was that it underestimated the difference which exists between various sections of the population” (306). Nothing like this in the Third Reich.
43. Andrew Roberts: Halifax “made the disastrous error of trying to translate his Indian experiences of dealing with Congress into policy dealing with the problems of Europe” (The Holy Fox, 41). Kenneth Rose: “What tarnishes the memory of the so-called appeasers is not that they were deterred from robustness by the strategic and economic realities of a defence policy; it is the sycophancy with which they witnessed the creeping enslavement of Europe” (King George V, 84).
44. But Churchill also knew that the limits of the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe ought to be defined and kept as far from the center as possible (in this the Americans did not support him) and that, as he said to de Gaulle in November 1944, this Russian rule would not last (“After the meal comes the digestion period”). To Colville, on New Year’s Day in 1953, he predicted that by the 1980s Communism would disappear from Eastern Europe.
45. Examples from Sheila Lawlor (an estimable historian) in her Churchill and the Politics of War: “John Charmless provocative biography … has been taken by supporters and detractors alike to remove the trappings of myth which Churchill wove around his own conduct. But for the early years of the war, the treatment is uncontroversial” (18). “Trappings of myth”: perhaps. “Uncontroversial”: no. Lawlor continues: Churchill ‘Svas helped by events themselves — the fall of France, Holland, and Belgium and the attack on Britain herself—and by his own reaction to them. His earlier characteristics of reaction and bombast.…” (43). Two different reactions? “Churchill’s decision to fight on was more reasonable and had more in common with that of Chamberlain and Halifax than his rhetoric might suggest, but it was his rhetoric which, in the summer of 1940, had begun to cast him into his wartime caricature” (87). Caricature? Image, rather: for an image is not independent from reality, whereas a caricature is but a part of it. About Chamberlain, she says: “Churchill, though insisting there should be no scapegoats, that all were equally responsible, that they were ‘all guilty’ — nonetheless did not stop the critics” (89). Yes, he did: and the result was most beneficial for his relationship with Chamberlain.
46. Hillgruber, a principal German historian of the Second World War, wrote in his massive and important book Hitlers Strategie, 144 n. 1, that “from his viewpoint” Hitler’s offers to Britain were “seriously meant” and “subjectively, honest.”
47. “I could hear this drumming coming right through the earth,” Enoch Powell later recalled. “Powell could see that Hitler was bent on war; worse, he thought that the Nazis would win” writes Derek Turner in “A Valediction for Enoch Powell,” Chronicles (November 1998). (Powell had a fine war record; he became the youngest brigadier in the British army.)