by John Kelly
There were other betrayals on the afternoon of the ninth, as events forced men to choose between loyalty to country, loyalty to party, loyalty to friends, and loyalty to the truth. Clement Davies, Duff Cooper, and Bob Boothby, three of the most influential antiappeasement MPs, began the morning pledging not to politick for individual candidates, and spent the afternoon politicking on behalf of Churchill. That day, the first lord was an easy sale. Bellicosity, tenacity, daring, certitude—qualities that had alternately annoyed, exasperated, and frightened two generations of MPs—looked different on a day when four hundred German tanks had been sighted in a wood east of the Belgian Ardennes and the German merchant fleet had switched to the frequency it had used just prior to the Norway invasion.
Later that afternoon, Lloyd George gave a remarkable speech. “When the history of [this period] comes to be written,” he told an almost empty House of Commons, “it will be seen that most of this trouble has originated in the fact that the victors in the late war did not carry out solemn pledges in the Treaty [of Versailles] which they themselves gave.” Many found it beyond strange that on the eve of war, Lloyd George would choose to make such an inflammatory accusation—but not his old nemesis, Neville Chamberlain. Lloyd George is “stak[ing] out a position from which ultimately he might be called on to make the peace,” the prime minister told his sister Ida a few days later.
As the afternoon wore on, sentiment continued to move in Churchill’s direction. Bob Boothby reported that there is “a gathering consensus of opinion in all quarters that you are the necessary and inevitable prime minister.” Clem Davies said that his lobbying had left Attlee and Greenwood “unable to distinguish between the P.M. and Halifax.” The euphoria in the Churchill camp was premature. Kingsley Wood’s intelligence was wrong. Chamberlain opened the afternoon meeting he had called to discuss the succession question with the announcement that he would remain in office if the Labour Party agreed to serve under him. Clement Attlee, who joined the meeting at a little after six, quickly disabused the prime minister of that notion. “Our party won’t have you, and I don’t think the country will have you, either.” Chamberlain needed a moment to digest Attlee’s words. When he spoke again, he asked if Labour would serve under another Conservative leader. Attlee and Greenwood (who was also present) said they thought the party would, but that they would be unable to give a definitive answer until they spoke to their colleagues, and that would take a few days. Labour’s annual party conference was scheduled to begin the following Monday, and most of the party’s leaders were already in Bournemouth, the Channel resort town where the conference was to be held. After the Labour men left, Chamberlain raised the succession question. Halifax, who had had a stomachache earlier in the day, felt his gnawing discomfort coming back.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Downing Street was Halifax’s for the asking on the evening of the ninth—Churchill’s candidacy had developed a terrific momentum. But the foreign secretary was the establishment’s choice. The king—and Chamberlain, who still led the Conservative Party—viewed Halifax as safe, and safety is what makes the establishment choice the choice of the establishment. Halifax might have known little of military affairs, but, unlike Churchill, he could be trusted not to risk the country’s future on a wild adventure. Even with Churchill gaining momentum, Halifax’s prudence alone might have propelled him into Downing Street on May 9, had he wanted to be prime minister. But he did not want to be prime minister—not in wartime.
The foreign secretary’s objections to high office were voluminous. A wartime leader should sit in the House of Commons, the center of power in the British parliamentary system, and Halifax sat in the House of Lords. A wartime leader should have a store of military knowledge, and a few weeks earlier, when asked whether Trondheim or Narvik should be attacked, Halifax had found himself unable to provide an informed answer. There was also the matter of Churchill, and what to do about him. According to Rab Butler, a Halifax confidant, the foreign secretary recognized that Churchill possessed the talents to be an outstanding war leader, but Halifax felt Churchill needed “steadying,” and was uncertain in which role he could best provide it, “as Prime Minister or as a Minister in a Churchill government?” Later Butler would say that Halifax’s decision to remain at the Foreign Office arose from his concern that “even if he did become PM, Churchill’s qualities and experience meant he would end up ‘running the war anyway’ and Halifax would end as sort of an Honorary Prime Minister.”
There are several accounts of how the leadership question was resolved on the evening of May 9. Churchill’s version, which appears in The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his World War Two memoirs, is the most famous and dramatic.
Usually I talk a great deal, but on this occasion I was silent. . . . Mr. Chamberlain [said he] felt . . . that [there] might be an obstacle to my obtaining [Labour’s] adherence at this juncture. I do not recall the actual words he used, but this was the implication. . . . His biographer, Mr. Feiling, states definitely that he preferred Lord Halifax.
As I remained silent a very long pause ensued. It certainly seemed longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemorations of Armistice Day. Then at length Halifax spoke. He said he felt his position as a Peer out of the House of Commons, would make it very difficult for him to discharge the duties of Prime Minister in a war like this. He would be held responsible for everything but would not have the power to guide the assembly upon whose confidence the life of every Government depended. He spoke for some minutes in this sense and by the time he had finished it was clear that the duty would fall on me—had in fact fallen upon me.
William Deakin, the research assistant and fact checker on The Gathering Storm, believes that Churchill was “hamming [it] up” in his account of the succession. He misstates the date—the meeting occurred on May 9, not the tenth—and fails to mention that Chief Whip Margesson was present. Years later Deakin would tell Andrew Roberts, Halifax’s biographer, that Churchill’s account was “not to be taken seriously.” Halifax’s account, which was written almost immediately after the meeting—not seven years later, as Churchill’s was—is regarded as the more accurate record of what transpired, not least because the account is consistent with what Halifax had been saying for days. Decisions about peace and war are the province of the House of Commons, and as a member of the House of Lords, Halifax’s ability to influence the decisions the Commons made on these issues would be severely limited.
The P.M., Winston, David Margesson and I sat down to it. The P.M. recapitulated the position and said that he had made up his mind that he must go, and that it must either be Winston or me. He would serve under either. . . . David Margesson said that unity was essential and he thought it impossible to attain under the P.M. He did not at that moment pronounce between Winston and me and my stomach ache continued.
I then said that for all the reasons given, the P.M. must probably go, but that I had no doubt at all in my own mind that for me to take it would create a quite impossible position. Quite apart from Winston’s qualities as compared to my own at this particular juncture, what would in fact be my position? Winston would be running Defense, and . . . I should have no access to the House of Commons. The inevitable result would be that being outside both these vital points of contact I should speedily become a more or less Honorary Prime Minister living in a kind of twilight just outside the things that really mattered. Winston with suitable expressions of regard and humility, said that he could not but feel the force of what I had said and the P.M. reluctantly, and Winston evidently with much less reluctance, finished by accepting my point of view.
Halifax’s withdrawal did not automatically make Churchill prime minister. The king had yet to weigh in on the appointment, and, despite a friendly late-night talk with Attlee and Greenwood, Labour had not yet agreed to serve under Churchill. That decision would be made by the party delegates in Bournemouth, many of them crusty old veterans of the hunger marches of the 1920s and t
he strikes and lockouts of the 1930s. “Tonypandy!” was their battle cry, and the general strike of 1926, when Churchill did use the army against strikers, their Calvary. The Halifax threat had also not entirely receded. Overnight, several of the foreign secretary’s supporters pressured him to reconsider his withdrawal, but that proved impossible. The next morning, when Rab Butler called to discuss the succession question, he was told that the foreign secretary was at the dentist’s.
* * *
May 9 was also a day of political crisis in Paris, where the government of Paul Reynaud was divided over the fate of Maurice Gamelin, the commander in chief of the French Army. A General Gamelin had served France in an almost unbroken line since the time of Louis IV, though none had advanced so far or displayed such a precocious interest in military affairs as the current General Gamelin. At nine years old, Gamelin was reputed to have had the largest toy soldier collection in Paris; at twenty-one, he graduated first in his class at the French military academy St. Cyr; during the Great War, he was an aide to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied Supreme Commander; and after the war he earned distinction as a military intellectual.
Underneath this impressive dossier lay a fatalistic nature and a certain rigidity of mind, but Gamelin’s expressionless face and habit of keeping to himself gave him a sphinxlike quality that allowed others to see what they wanted to see in him. Thus, to admirers such as former premier Daladier, the general’s solidity of manner and body symbolized the resolve and confidence of France itself, while to detractors it symbolized a dullness of imagination and spirit. Upon assuming office the previous March, Premier Reynaud had leaned toward the latter view, but he kept an open mind until Gamelin turned out to be as surprised as he was by the German invasion of Norway. “That nerveless man, I would be a criminal if I left [him] at the head of [the] French Army.”
For several weeks, Reynaud went back and forth about dismissing Gamelin, but he always ended up where he had started. Without the political support of Daladier, who was a member of his cabinet, Reynaud’s government would fall, and Daladier was Gamelin’s chief political patron. Meanwhile, the rumors of an imminent German offensive continued to mount, and Reynaud caught a bad spring cold. On May 8, when he called a snap cabinet meeting for the next day, he was pale and feverish and had a hacking cough. Elie Bois, that gossipiest of Parisian journalists, credits Reynaud’s miraculous recovery on the ninth to the doctor who visited his apartment early that morning and “doped him to the full.” The weather probably deserves some credit for the premier’s recovery as well. In 1940, April in Paris could not hold a candle to May in Paris. When wartime listeners heard “The Last Time I Saw Paris” on the wireless, the Paris they thought of was the one Clare Boothe described that last May the city was free. “Chestnuts burst into leaf on lovely avenues. . . . [T]he sunlight dances off the opalescent gray buildings.” Sunbathers lounge on the quays along the Seine; the Ritz [is] crowded “with lovely ladies wearing simple sun dresses or the smart uniforms of the Union des Femmes,” and the great jewels in the windows of Van Cleef & Arpels and Cartier “sparkle in the sunlight.”
Reynaud arrived at the afternoon cabinet meeting on the ninth with color in his cheeks and a bulky dossier against Gamelin under his arm. After dispensing with a few minor pieces of business, the premier opened the dossier and began reading. Minutes passed, then hours. When Reynaud finished, it was three o’clock and France no longer had a government and he no longer was premier. “If [Gamelin] is guilty, I am,” Daladier said, then offered his resignation. Seeing no other alternative, Reynaud offered his. “As I can no longer make my point of view prevail, I am no longer Head of the government.” When the meeting concluded at about 4:00 p.m., the sunbathers along the Seine were packing up, the racetrack at Auteuil was emptying out, France and Britain no longer had settled governments—and German paratroopers were making final preparations for an early morning assault on Holland and Belgium.
London learned of the German offensive at around 5:30 a.m. on May 10, about an hour after the Second Panzer Division crossed the Belgian frontier under the remains of the night sky. A few minutes later, the ablutions of the Dutch border guards were interrupted by a squadron of Heinkels passing overhead. Gazing down at the early morning countryside, one German pilot thought “How crazy . . . Children playing by the stream, a white dog jump[ing] around them barking; why is this lovely peaceful land suddenly ‘enemy territory’?” In Paris, where air raid sirens had begun blaring a little before 5:00 a.m., Reynaud added a new charge to his dossier on Gamelin. Ten days earlier, the general had dismissed a warning from a Wehrmacht source about a German offensive between May 8 and May 10. In the residential quarters of the French capital, dogs, startled by the sirens, barked; lights twinkled on above the deserted streets; and faces appeared between window curtains. “Everyone like us was . . . looking upward,” recalled one Parisian.
In Downing Street, the first news of the German attack arrived in fits and starts. A 6:00 a.m. report that “Holland alone” had been attacked was followed by a 7:00 a.m. report of German attacks on Luxembourg and Belgium. By the time the war cabinet convened at 8:00 a.m., the reports had become more detailed. German parachutists were fighting in the streets of The Hague; bombs were dropping on the French town of Nancy; the HMS Kelly had been torpedoed off the French coast. “Perhaps the darkest day in English history,” Henry Channon thought as he scanned the morning headlines at a London kiosk. “Lille bombed”; “Paris raided”; “Bombs in Kent.” By early afternoon on the tenth, close to a million men were moving across the northern European plain under a sublime May sky. One of them, a German sergeant, took out his journal and wrote, “The warmth and brilliance of the day is oppressive.” Vera Brittain, who was attending the Bournemouth Conference, listened to the war news for a while. Then, unable to bear any more, she walked through Bournemouth, trying to lose herself in the views. “Cliffs shin[ing] luminously . . . the sweet dry scent of innumerable fir trees.” For a while, the distractions worked. Then, like the German sergeant, Brittain felt a sense of oppression descend on her. “It is unbelievable that only a few miles away, across the misty sea, which looks so serene below the yellow hedge of gorse that fringes the cliffs, men are destroying one another in their thousands and the civilization of half a dozen countries is going up in smoke and flame.” In Paris, André Beaufre, a young French captain, came across General Gamelin in Vincennes, the home of the French High Command. The general was striding “up and down” a corridor, “humming with a pleased and martial air.” The maps in Gamelin’s war room indicated that the German offensive was unfolding as he had expected: thrusts through Holland and central Belgium.
Like millions of other Britons, Randolph Churchill learned of the German offensive over breakfast. When the news crackled through on the wireless in his mess hall, Randolph immediately called his father: “What about . . . becoming prime minister today?” “Oh, I don’t know about that,” the elder Churchill replied. Earlier that morning, Chamberlain had announced that he intended to stay in office until “the French battle was finished.” Labour MP Hugh Dalton was unhappy but unsurprised by the prime minister’s decision. “The old man is an incorrigible limpet, always trying new tricks to stay on the rock.” Harold Nicolson also believed, war or no war, that Chamberlain had to go. Then he heard Alec Douglas-Home, a Scottish aristocrat with Tammany Hall–caliber political skills, address a meeting of the Watching Committee. Of the Chamberlain supporters who fanned out across London on the morning of the tenth to make the case that the prime minister should stay on, none executed that brief more artfully and elegantly than Douglas-Home. Listening to the Scotsman, Nicolson found himself thinking, well, yes, there was a good deal of “sense” in Douglas-Home’s argument, the dangers of the moment do require a “steady, experienced” hand like Chamberlain’s. Douglas-Home’s opposite number on the tenth was Brendan Bracken, a Churchill aide who possessed the temperament of a bomb thrower, an off-again, on-again relationship with rectitude, a
n impressive intellect, an irresistible frizz of Harpo Marx hair, bottle-thick glasses, and the knowing smile of an insider who is privy to everyone else’s secrets.
Upon hearing of Chamberlain’s decision to stay in office, Bracken began working the phones. A few hours later, Lord Salisbury issued a statement to the press reaffirming his support for Churchill, and the Labour Party published an official denial of the reports that the party had agreed to enter a national government under Chamberlain. In what must have been the most personally difficult moment of the day for the prime minister, Kingsley Wood, whom Chamberlain still regarded as a loyal friend, told him that the only honorable recourse was resignation. Chamberlain’s lingering hopes of remaining in office were crushed at the four thirty cabinet meeting when an aide handed him a note. Chamberlain read it while General Ironside briefed the cabinet on the situation in Belgium. When the general finished, Chamberlain read the note aloud.
The Labour Party had been asked whether they would consider in principal co-operating in the government (a) under the present Prime Minister or (b) under some other Prime Minister. The Labour Party’s answer ha[s] now been received. Their reply to the first question was in the negative and to second question was as follows: “The Labour Party are prepared to take their share of responsibility as a full partner in a new Government under a new Prime Minister.”
Shortly thereafter, Chamberlain offered his resignation to a sympathetic and disappointed king. “[I] told him how grossly unfair I thought he had been treated and that I was terribly sorry that all this controversy had happened. We then had a talk about his successor [and] I, of course, suggested Halifax.” Chamberlain told the king that Halifax wanted to stay at the Foreign Office. Below Halifax, the pickings became thin. There was Anthony Eden, the public’s first choice for prime minister in a recent Mass Observation poll, but Eden’s popularity owed more to his good looks than to his acumen. Senior Tory politicians considered Eden, secretary of state for the dominions, too young and untested for high office. There were also the Munichois, men such as John Simon and Sam Hoare, who had a deep knowledge of government but prewar records of appeasement. When the second tier was eliminated, only one candidate remained, Churchill, who described his accession to the premiership on May 11 as a rendezvous with destiny. “[I felt] all my past life had been but preparation for this hour and for this trial.” Generations of readers have thrilled to the description, but it was precisely this kind of romanticism that made the prospect of a Churchill government so disturbing to the king and to many of the new prime minister’s former and current colleagues.