by Erik Larson
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A NEW TELEPHONE CALL from France drew Churchill back to London. The situation was growing dramatically worse, the French army wilting. Despite the grave news, Churchill seemed unfazed, and this caused a further warming in Jock Colville’s attitude toward his new employer. In his diary that Sunday, Colville wrote, “Whatever Winston’s shortcomings, he seems to be the man for the occasion. His spirit is indomitable and even if France and England should be lost, I feel he would carry on the crusade himself with a band of privateers.”
He added: “Perhaps my judgments of him have been harsh, but the situation was very different a few weeks ago.”
At a four-thirty meeting of his War Cabinet, Churchill learned that the commander in chief of Britain’s forces in France was contemplating a withdrawal toward the channel coast, identifying in particular the port city of Dunkirk. Churchill opposed the idea. He feared that the force would be trapped and destroyed.
Churchill made the decision that, in fact, no fighter aircraft would be sent to France. With that country’s fate now seeming so tenuous, there was little point, and every fighter was needed in England to defend against the coming invasion.
He worked on his radio speech until the last minute, from six to nine that night, before settling himself in front of a BBC microphone.
“I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister in a solemn hour for the life of our country,” he began.
He explained how the Germans had broken through the French line, using a “remarkable” combination of aircraft and tanks. However, he said, the French had proven themselves in the past to be adept at raising counteroffensives, and this talent, in tandem with the power and skill of the British Army, could turn the situation around.
The speech set a pattern that he would follow throughout the war, offering a sober appraisal of facts, tempered with reason for optimism.
“It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour,” he said. “It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.”
He left out completely any reference to the possibility, discussed just a few hours earlier with his War Cabinet, that Britain might withdraw the BEF from France.
Next he addressed his main reason for giving the speech: to warn his countrymen of what lay ahead. “After this battle in France abates its force there will come the battle for our Islands, for all that Britain is and all that Britain means,” he said. “In that supreme emergency we shall not hesitate to take every step—even the most drastic—to call forth from our people the last ounce and inch of effort of which they are capable.”
The speech terrified some listeners, but Churchill’s apparent candor—at least on the threat of invasion, if not the true state of the French army—encouraged others, according to the Home Intelligence division of the Ministry of Information. The division went to great lengths to monitor public opinion and morale, publishing weekly reports that drew from more than one hundred sources, including postal and telephone censors, movie-theater managers, and the operators of bookstalls owned by W. H. Smith. After Churchill’s broadcast, Home Intelligence conducted a lightning survey of listeners. “Of 150 house-to-house interviews in the London area,” it reported, “approximately half said they were frightened and worried by the speech; the rest were ‘heartened,’ ‘made more determined,’ ‘stiffened.’ ”
Now Churchill turned again to the agonizing decision about what to do with the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers in France. His inclination was to insist that they take the offensive and fight it out, but the time for such heroics seemed to have passed. The British Expeditionary Force was in full retreat toward the coast, pursued by Germany’s armored divisions, which had given Hitler so lethal an advantage in his drive across Europe. The BEF faced the very real prospect of annihilation.
The Churchill who on Sunday had struck Colville as being unfazed was here supplanted by a prime minister who seemed deeply worried about the fate of the empire in his charge. Wrote Colville on Tuesday, May 21, “I have not seen Winston so depressed.”
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CHURCHILL RESOLVED, AGAINST THE advice of his chiefs of staff and others, to fly to Paris for a second meeting, this time in foul weather.
The visit achieved nothing, except to worry Clementine and daughter Mary. “It was terrible flying weather,” Mary wrote in her diary, “and I was so anxious. The news is unbelievably bad—one can only hang on by praying it will come out all right.”
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SO TENSE WERE THINGS, so high the pressure on all, that members of Churchill’s cabinet decided that he ought to have a personal physician, though the patient himself did not agree. The assignment fell to Sir Charles Wilson, dean of the medical school at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. A medical officer in the prior war, he had been awarded a Military Cross in 1916 for bravery in the Battle of the Somme.
Late in the morning on Friday, May 24, Wilson found himself at Admiralty House, being led upstairs to Churchill’s bedroom. (In Britain, a doctor of Wilson’s stature is typically referred to not by the prefix “Dr.” but, rather, as “Mr.”) “I have become his doctor,” Wilson wrote in his diary, “not because he wanted one, but because certain members of the Cabinet, who realized how essential he has become, have decided that somebody ought to keep an eye on his health.”
It was almost noon by now, but as Wilson entered the room he found Churchill still in bed, seated upright against a bedrest, reading. Churchill did not look up.
Wilson walked to his bedside. Churchill still did not acknowledge his presence. He continued to read.
After a few moments—what to Wilson “seemed quite a long time”—Churchill lowered the document and with impatience said, “I don’t know why they are making such a fuss. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
He resumed reading, with Wilson still at hand.
After another overlong interval, Churchill abruptly shoved away his bedrest, threw off his covers, and barked, “I suffer from dyspepsia”—indigestion, or what later generations would call heartburn—“and this is the treatment.”
He launched into a breathing exercise.
Wilson watched. “His big white belly was moving up and down,” he recalled later, “when there was a knock on the door, and the P.M. grabbed at the sheet as Mrs. Hill came into the room.” This was Kathleen Hill, thirty-nine, his beloved personal secretary. She and her typewriter were ever present, whether Churchill was clothed or not.
“Soon after,” Wilson wrote, “I took my leave. I do not like the job, and I do not think the arrangement can last.”
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FROM JOHN COLVILLE’S PERSPECTIVE, Churchill had no need for a doctor’s attention. He seemed fit and was once again in good spirits, having shed his depression of several days earlier. Later that Friday, Colville arrived at Admiralty House to find Churchill “dressed in the most brilliant of flowery dressing-gowns and puffing a long cigar as he ascended from the Upper War Room to his bedroom.”
He was about to take one of his daily baths, these prepared with precision—ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit and two-thirds full—by his valet-butler Frank Sawyers, present at all hours (“the inevitable, egregious Sawyers,” as Colville wrote). Churchill took two baths every day, his longtime habit, no matter where he was and regardless of the urgency of the events unfolding elsewhere, whether at the embassy in Paris during one of his meetings with French leaders or aboard his prime ministerial train, whose lavatory included a bathtub.
On this Friday, a number of important telephone calls demanded his attention during his bath hour. With Colville standing by, Churchill took each call, climbing naked from the tub and swathing himself with a towel.
Colville found this to be one of Churchill’s most endearing traits—“his complete absence of personal vanity.”
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Colville witnessed scenes at Admiralty House and 10 Downing Street unlike anything he had encountered while working for Chamberlain. Churchill would wander the halls wearing a red dressing gown, a helmet, and slippers with pom-poms. He was also given to wearing his sky-blue “siren suit,” a one-piece outfit of his own design that could be pulled on at a moment’s notice. His staff called it his “rompers.” At times, according to his security officer, Inspector Thompson, the outfit made Churchill look “so pneumatic as to suggest he might at any moment rise from the floor and sail around over his own acres.”
Colville was coming to like the man.
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CHURCHILL’S EQUANIMITY WAS ALL the more remarkable given the news emerging that Friday from across the channel. To everyone’s continued mystification, the great French army now seemed on the verge of final defeat. “The one firm rock on which everyone was willing to build for the last two years was the French army,” wrote Foreign Secretary Halifax in his diary, “and the Germans walked through it like they did through the Poles.”
That day, too, Churchill received a sobering document that dared contemplate this hitherto unthinkable outcome, still so beyond imagining that the authors of the report, the chiefs of staff, could not bring themselves to mention it in the title, calling their paper “British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality.”
CHAPTER 5
Moondread
“THE OBJECT OF THIS PAPER,” the report began, “is to investigate the means whereby we could continue to fight single-handed if French resistance were to collapse completely, involving the loss of a substantial proportion of the British Expeditionary Force, and the French Government were to make terms with Germany.”
Labeled “MOST SECRET,” it made for a frightening read. One of its fundamental assumptions was that the United States would provide “full economic and financial support.” Without this, the report noted in italics, “we do not think we could continue the war with any chance of success.” It forecast that only a fragment of the BEF could be evacuated from France.
The overriding fear was that if the French did capitulate, Hitler would turn his armies and air force against England. “Germany,” the report said, “has ample forces to invade and occupy this country. Should the enemy succeed in establishing a force, with its vehicles, firmly ashore—the Army in the United Kingdom, which is very short of equipment, has not got the offensive power to drive it out.”
Everything depended “on whether our fighter defenses will be able to reduce the scale of attack to reasonable bounds.” Britain’s energies were to be concentrated on the production of fighters, the training of crews, and defense of aircraft factories. “The crux of the whole problem is the air defence of this country.”
If France fell, the report said, the task would be immeasurably more difficult. Previous plans for homeland defense were based on the assumption—the certainty—that the Luftwaffe would be flying from bases within Germany, and would thus have limited ability to penetrate deep into England. But now British strategists had to face the prospect of German fighters and bombers taking off from airfields along the French coast, just minutes from the English shore, and from bases in Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway. These bases, the report said, would allow Germany “to concentrate a very heavy weight of long and short-range bomber attack over a large area of this country.”
A central question was whether the British public would be able to endure what was sure to be a furious assault by the full force of Germany’s air force. The morale of the country, the report warned, “will be subjected to a heavier strain than ever before.” The authors, however, found reason to believe that the people’s morale would hold, “if they realize—as they are beginning to do—that the existence of the Empire is at stake.” It was time, the report said, “to inform the public of the true dangers that confront us.”
London seemed certain to be Hitler’s primary target. In a 1934 speech to the House of Commons, Churchill himself had called it “the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous, fat, valuable cow tied up to attract the beast of prey.” After one cabinet meeting, Churchill led his ministers out to the street and with a grim half-smile told them, “Take a good look round. I expect all these buildings will look very different in two or three weeks’ time.”
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EVEN THE REPORT from the chiefs of staff, gloomy as it was, did not envision the rapid and complete collapse already underway across the channel. With a German victory in France nearly certain, British intelligence now forecast that Germany might invade England immediately, without waiting for a formal French surrender. The British expected that an invasion would begin with a titanic onslaught by the German air force, potentially a “knock-out” blow—or, as Churchill called it, an aerial “banquet”—with as many as fourteen thousand aircraft darkening the sky.
British strategists believed that the Luftwaffe had four times as many aircraft as the RAF. Germany’s three main bombers—the Junkers Ju 88, the Dornier Do 17, and the Heinkel He 111—carried bomb loads ranging from two thousand to eight thousand pounds, more than could have been imagined in the prior war. One aircraft was particularly fearsome, the Stuka, its name a contraction of the German word for dive-bomber: Sturzkampfflugzeug. The plane looked like a giant bent-wing insect and was equipped with an apparatus, the Jericho-Trompete (“Jericho trumpet”), that caused it to emit a terrifying shriek while diving. It could place bombs—up to five at a time—with far more precision than a standard aircraft, and had terrified Allied troops during Germany’s blitzkrieg attacks.
As British planners saw it, Germany possessed the ability to bomb England to the point where it might have no other option but to surrender, an outcome contemplated long before by theorists of aerial warfare who saw “strategic bombing,” or “terror bombing,” as a means of subduing an enemy. Germany’s bombing of Rotterdam had seemed to validate such thinking. The day after the Luftwaffe’s attack, the Dutch surrendered, out of fear that other cities would be destroyed. England’s ability to defend itself from this kind of campaign depended entirely on the nation’s aircraft industries’ capacity to produce fighter aircraft—Hurricanes and Spitfires—at a rate high enough not just to compensate for the fast-mounting losses but also to increase the overall number of planes available for combat. Fighters alone in no way could win the war, although Churchill believed that with enough aircraft, England might be able to hold Hitler at bay and stave off invasion long enough for the United States to enter the war.
But fighter production lagged. England’s aircraft plants operated on a prewar schedule that did not take into account the new reality of having a hostile force based just across the channel. Production, though increasing, was suppressed by the fusty practices of a peacetime bureaucracy only now awakening to the realities of total war. Shortages of parts and materials disrupted production. Damaged aircraft accumulated as they awaited repair. Many nearly completed planes lacked engines and instruments. Vital parts were stored in far-flung locations, jealously guarded by feudal officials reserving them for their own future needs.
With all this in mind, Churchill, on his first day as prime minister, created an entirely new ministry devoted solely to the production of fighters and bombers, the Ministry of Aircraft Production. In Churchill’s view, this new ministry was the only thing that could save Britain from defeat, and he was confident he knew just the man to run it: his longtime friend and occasional antagonist Max Aitken—Lord Beaverbrook—a man who drew controversy the way steeples draw lightning.
Churchill offered him the job that night, but Beaverbrook demurred. He had made his fortune in newspapers and knew nothing about running factories that manufactured products as complex as fighters and bombers. Moreover, his health was impaired. He was plagued by eye troubles and asthma, so much so that he devoted a room in his London mansion, Stornoway House, to asthm
a treatments and filled it with kettles to produce steam. Two weeks from turning sixty-one, he had pulled back from direct management of his newspaper empire and was intent on spending more time at his villa at Cap-d’Ail, on the southeast coast of France, though Hitler had killed this plan for the time being. Beaverbrook’s secretaries were still composing draft letters of refusal when, on the evening of May 12, apparently on impulse, he accepted the post. He became minister of aircraft production two days later.
Churchill understood Beaverbrook, and knew on an instinctive level that he was the man to jolt awake the still-slumbering aircraft industry. He also understood that Beaverbrook could be difficult—would be difficult—and anticipated that he would spark conflict. But it did not matter. As one American visitor put it, “The PM, who has the most kindly feelings toward Beaverbrook, looked at him as an indulgent parent would to a small boy at a party who had said something not quite appropriate, but made no comment.”
There was more to Churchill’s decision, however. Churchill needed Beaverbrook’s presence as a friend, to provide counsel on matters beyond aircraft production. Despite later hagiography, Churchill did not and frankly could not manage the staggering pressure of directing the war by himself. He relied heavily on others, even if sometimes these others merely served as an audience on whom he could test his thoughts and plans. Beaverbrook could be counted on for candor at all times, and to deliver advice without regard for politics or personal feelings. Where Pug Ismay was a calming and cooling influence, Beaverbrook was gasoline. He was also wildly entertaining, a trait that Churchill loved and needed. Ismay sat quietly, ready to offer advice and counsel; Beaverbrook enlivened every room he entered. On occasion he called himself Churchill’s court jester.
Canadian by birth, Beaverbrook had moved to England before the previous war. In 1916, he bought the moribund Daily Express, and over time he grew its circulation sevenfold, to 2.5 million, cementing his reputation as an ingenious maverick. “Beaverbrook enjoyed being provocative,” wrote Virginia Cowles, a prominent chronicler of life in wartime England who worked for Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard. Complacency was as tempting a target to him “as a balloon to a small boy with a pin,” Cowles remarked. Beaverbrook and Churchill had been friends for three decades, though the intimacy of their connection had tended to wax and wane.