by John Kelly
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One day in 1906, thirty-two-year-old Winston Churchill told a young woman, “We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glowworm.”
“I have met a genius,” the young woman exclaimed upon arriving home. Her father, Herbert Asquith, a future prime minister, listened to her gush on, but when she said the name of the extraordinary young man was Winston Churchill, his surprise dissolved into irony. “Well, Winston would certainly agree with you there, but I am not sure you will find many others of the same mind.” As British historian Paul Addison has noted, one of the master narratives of British political life in the first half of the twentieth century was the “conflict between Churchill’s heroic self-image, [which he] communicated to the world through a stupendous barrage of publicity . . . and the hard-bitten observations of politicians, civil servants and military men, conversing in their clubs after another difficult day with Winston.” Churchill in the abstract was easier to admire than Churchill the flesh-and-blood man whose remarkable qualities of mind and heart came with a high price in the form of rashness, bellicosity, a galloping ambition, endless monologues, and a backward-looking vision. Spread end to end, the Churchill vision was as colorful as the Bayeux Tapestry, but he sought Britain’s future in its past, in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods of his childhood and young manhood. Sensing this instinctively, in 1945 the British public chose someone else to lead them into the postwar future, just as in May 1940 they instinctively knew that Churchill was the right man to lead them through the war and rallied around him. “If I had to spend my whole life with one man,” wrote Nella Last, a plainspoken North Country woman, “I’d choose Mr. Chamberlain, but I think I’d sooner have Mr. Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked. He has a funny face, like a bull dog living on our street that has done more to drive out our unwanted dogs and cats . . . than all the complaints of house holders.”
“Old men forget and about Churchill they forgot by the Imperial gallon.” Had it been up to what one historian has called the “respectable tendency” in the Conservative Party—the men and women who spoke of “England” rather than “Britain,” put on mourning clothes when Chamberlain fell, and then wrote “Winston and Me” memoirs after the war—Churchill would never have become prime minister. “Hitler will thank Thor for our quislings [Churchill supporters],” wrote Charles Waterhouse, a “true blue” Tory, country gentleman, Life Guard in the First World War, and MP for Southeast Leicester. “I regard this as a greater disaster than the invasion of the Low Lands,” wrote that shrewd political wife Nancy Dugdale after Churchill became prime minister. “The crooks are on top as they were in the last war,” warned Lord Davidson, an influential political writer. A “negation of democracy” said Patrick Donner, an influential Conservative MP and a disillusioned Churchillian. In the Foreign Office, Henry Channon and Rab Butler raised a toast to Chamberlain, the “king over water,” when the seals of office passed to Churchill. In Downing Street, John Colville heard whispers of a Chamberlain restoration. None of the naysaying would have posed a threat to Churchill had he come to power with a political base of his own, but he was too individualistic and idiosyncratic to attract a large following in or outside a political party. On the afternoon of the eleventh, when he told Chamberlain “to a large extent, I am in your hands,” he was not just being polite. Churchill could not hold Downing Street without the Conservative Party, and he could not hold the Conservative Party without Chamberlain, who remained its leader and commanded the support of the Conservative faithful in and outside the House of Commons. Prime Minister Churchill’s first round of cabinet appointments reflected this reality.
To his own supporters, the new prime minister gave very little. Leo Amery was sent to the India Office, far from the center of power; Duff Cooper, to the Ministry of Information, closer to the center of things, but not that much closer, while stalwarts such as Harold Macmillan and Harold Nicolson had to settle for junior postings. Labour did better. Attlee entered the war cabinet as lord privy seal, and Greenwood as minister without portfolio. (Holders of this post do not oversee a ministry, as other members of the cabinet do, but, like their colleagues, they do get to vote on all decisions the cabinet makes.) Two other Labour men also received important appointments. Hugh Dalton became the minister of economic warfare, and Ernest Bevin, labour minister. Of the thirty-four ministerial posts in the Churchill government, twenty-one were filled by men who had served under Chamberlain—among them Anthony Eden, a sometime Churchill ally who became secretary of state for war, and Kingsley Wood, who was given Exchequer as a reward for his betrayal of his old master. The only Chamberlainite of consequence who failed to be reappointed was Sam Hoare, who was packed off to Madrid as ambassador to Spain. Chamberlain himself remained in the war cabinet as lord president of the council, a post whose nominal duties allowed him to focus his energy and attention on the war. Lord Halifax was reappointed foreign secretary. Unofficially, the two men were in the cabinet to ensure that Churchill did not risk the life of the nation on some rash new adventure. “The only hope lies in . . . the wise old elephants [restraining] the rogue elephant,” said Lord Hankey, a senior civil servant.
The British public was more welcoming. “Good luck, Winnie!” and “God bless you!” well-wishers would shout when Churchill’s car arrived at the Admiralty, where he was staying until the Chamberlains moved out of Downing Street. The new prime minister would emerge from the backseat, tip his hat, and then pose for the cameras with a group of well-wishers. The next day, a photo of a confident, smiling Churchill would be on the front page of the Mail or the Express, and no one would guess what he told an aide after one of those photo ops. “Poor people, poor people. They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster for quite a long time.”
The closest Churchill came to articulating that thought in public was in his inaugural address as prime minister, on May 13. He told the House that, for the foreseeable future, he could promise little but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” The May 13 speech was also noteworthy for two other things: the cool reception Churchill received from Conservative backbenchers, especially in comparison to the ovation Chamberlain received that evening, and the new war aim he introduced. Gone was the talk of inducing a “change of heart” in Germany and of teaching Herr Hitler that aggression does not pay. Now, Britain’s goal was “Victory, victory at all costs! Victory, however long and hard the road may be!” Victory, even if it meant total war and all that came with total war: burned-out cities, ruined factories, and national bankruptcy. The two “wise old elephants” kept silent about the “rogue elephant’s” new war aim, but events in France would not keep them silent for long.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“THERE FADED AWAY THIS NOISE WHICH WAS A GREAT ARMY”
“It went too damn well. . . . What is [Hitler] up to?”
It was May 11, two days before Churchill’s inaugural speech in the House of Commons, and a Times of London correspondentI was standing on an unshaded road just inside the Belgian frontier, scanning the sky. Except for a few puffy white cumulus clouds, it was empty. The reporter was puzzled. The BEF unit he was attached to had been on the road for nearly eight hours and, other than the occasional visit by a curious Storch, a German reconnaissance aircraft, the Luftwaffe had yet to appear.
Hundreds of other British and French units were also on the march that morning, and they were all converging on the same point. After examining the documents in Hoenmanns’s plane, General Gamelin had concluded that Case Yellow, the Germans’ offensive plan, would unfold like the Schlieffen plan of 1914: a thrust through Belgium into northern France, then a swing southward toward Paris. The only notable variant in Yellow was that it included an attack on Holland, which had remained neutral in the Great War. Looking for a place to break the German drive, Gamelin’s eye fell on the Dyle, a river east of Brussels. The north–south direction of the Dyle made it a natural defensive line, and the Belgians had already built a network of antitank posit
ions along its banks. The Dyle’s position, well east of the Channel coast, would also make London happy. In a fit of solipsism, the British had convinced themselves that Britain, not France, was the target of the Case Yellow offensive. After seizing air bases along the Dutch and Belgian coasts, the Germans planned to bomb Britain into submission. As a defensive position, the Dyle possessed only one drawback: it was in Belgium—and Belgium was neutral, and its new young king, Leopold, was determined to keep it that way.
After the capture of the German plan the previous January, the Allies and the Belgian High Command did hold secret staff talks, but when the Luftwaffe blew Clare Boothe out of a Brussels hotel bed in the early hours of May 10, Belgium was still neutral and the French and British troops tasked with defending the Dyle line were asleep in base camps many miles away, in northern France. As bugles blared and rifles and backpacks were examined and reexamined, there was much nervous talk among the troops about air attacks. The French and British units marching up to the Dyle would be moving along open roads under an unclouded sky. General Alan Brooke, the dour Ulsterman who commanded the BEF’s Second Corps, was as surprised as the Times reporter by the Luftwaffe’s absence. “Everything so far has been running like clockwork with less interference from bombing than I had anticipated,” Brooke noted in his diary.
The Second Corps’ experience was not unusual. On May 11, the only thing awaiting most of the British and French troops entering Belgium were grateful Belgians. “In towns and villages,” said one British captain, men and women “lined our route and little children ran along [beside] the trucks, throwing flowers to the troops. . . . People in motorcars drove up and down the convoy, distributing cigarettes and chocolate, and whenever we stopped, women came out of the house with hot coffee.” For the veterans of the Great War—the colonels, majors, and senior sergeants who had friends buried at Dickebusch Old Military Cemetery, Dickebusch New Military Cemetery, Kemmel Château Cemetery, Kemmel Churchyard Cemetery, and a dozen other British and Commonwealth burial sites in Belgium—the return to the country of their early manhood occasioned a somber remembrance of things past. The veterans seemed to be “retracing steps taken in a dream,” as if “they saw again faces of friends long dead and heard the half remembered names of towns and villages,” wrote Drew Middleton, an American war correspondent.
The ferocious air battle in Holland, which drew in hundreds of German aircraft on May 10 and 11, was widely credited for the safe passage. But Paul de Villelume, a French colonel, thought that explanation was nonsense. The Germans are luring the Allies into a trap, he told Gamelin during a visit to the French High Command. Gamelin shrugged and said even if de Villelume was right, it was too late to do anything about it. “When we took the decision to go into Belgium, we decided to take all the risks.” The German planners had modeled their offensive on the bullfight, and, in a sly piece of typecasting, they had assigned Gamelin—fatalistic, rigid, and unimaginative—the role of the bull. The Wehrmacht attacks in central Belgium and southern Holland were the matador’s cape. They would draw the best French and British infantry and armored units north to meet what appeared to be the main German thrust; the matador’s sword were the Panzer divisions hidden in the high forests of the Belgian Ardennes, the weak center of the Allied line. As the French and British rushed north to take up positions on the Dyle, the Panzers would burst out of the Ardennes and spear Gamelin in the flank.
“I could have wept with joy,” Hitler said of the moment he learned the Allies had adopted the Dyle plan; and on May 13, when he learned that the Panzers had pierced Gamelin’s flank along the Ardennes, for once the Führer was speechless. “It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle!” is all he could say.
General Irwin Rommel began May 13 crouched in a ditch in Dinant, a picturesque little Belgian river town that sits in a low valley between a high rock face and the Meuse River, the last natural barrier before the rolling tank country of eastern France. Behind Rommel, men and equipment were massed in rows back to the high woods of the Ardennes east of Dinant. In front of him, a column of Mark IV Panzers was creeping along the eastern bank of the river at walking speed, firing their guns point-blank into the French positions on the other side of the Meuse. Overhead, a squadron of Stuka dive bombers assembled into attack formation. The planes dipped their noses toward the river; the screech of sirens rent the air and silvery geysers of water erupted on the surface of the Meuse. Simultaneously, a stream of field-gray uniforms and rubber dingies rushed past Rommel’s position and down to the water’s edge. Firing from the French side of the river intensified, “then a rubber [raft] came drifting down [river] toward Rommel. The badly wounded soldier clinging to the side of the raft shouted ‘help!’ ” Rommel ignored his plea. “The enemy fire was too heavy.”
First-class French units might have been able to hold the western bank of the Meuse on the morning of the thirteenth; but, not expecting a major battle in the Ardennes, Gamelin had put most of his Class A divisions on the Dyle. With the exception of two Class A reserve divisions, the Meuse front was defended by undertrained, underequipped Class B units who were quickly overwhelmed by the professionalism of the German troops. French gun crews fled blockhouses; French officers abandoned their commands; panicked privates and corporals turned their helmets backward—a sign of Communist sympathy—and ran through the French positions, shouting “Beat it! Beat it!” By the evening of the thirteenth, there was a German bridgehead on the western bank of the Meuse at Dinant, and a second, more threatening lodgment downriver, around Sedan. The exhausted French troops in the eighty-four-kilometer gap between the two towns spent the night of May 13–14 listening to the intermittent shellfire from the Germans’ side of the river and wondering what the morning would bring.
When Captain Beaufre arrived at the headquarters of the Northeast Command at 3:00 a.m. on May 14, General Alphonse Georges, commander of the northern front, was seated in a cone of light under a chandelier in a huge salon. Georges’s gloved left hand, paralyzed during an assassination attempt in 1934, hung limply at his side; his right hand, a good, strong soldier’s hand, was tracing the gap in the Meuse front on a table map. Behind him, a group of senior commanders were following the hand’s progress across the map from Dinant to Sedan. In the gap between the two towns, several hundred thousand French soldiers awaited orders from this room, yet except for the muted voice of the general describing the situation along the river, and the chirping of the crickets outside in the spring darkness, the salon was quiet. Beaufre was surprised. He had expected to hear telephones ringing, clerks shouting—the pandemonium of a command in crisis. The quiet continued for a few moments. Then, abruptly, Georges rose from the map table and announced: “Our front ha[s] been pushed in at Sedan.” His soldier’s discipline broke, and he fell into a chair and “a sob silence[d] him.”
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Twelve hours later, Churchill received an urgent call from Reynaud, who requested that an additional ten RAF fighter squadrons be sent to France “at once, if possible today.” (A squadron contains twelve to twenty-four aircraft.) Churchill hesitated. A new Air Staff report estimated that sixty fighter squadrons would be necessary “for the adequate defense of this country,” and the chief of the Air Staff, Cyril Newall, believed that if Holland fell and the Luftwaffe could operate from bases on the Dutch coast, even sixty squadrons might be insufficient. The Air Staff report also contained another important number: twenty-nine. That was the number of fighter squadrons currently available for home defense. If ten squadrons were sent to France, Churchill knew there was a good chance that most of them would never see Britain again. The wastage rate in the combat zone was ferocious. In the past four days, the RAF had lost almost two hundred planes, including more than half the seventy British bombers sent to attack the German lodgment at Sedan. He sent Reynaud a soothing but ambiguous reply: “No time is being lost in studying what we can do to meet the situation.”
Later that evening, in a conversation with Ambassador Kennedy, Churchi
ll became the supplicant. Britain, which ended the First World War with 433 destroyers, had entered the Second World War with 200, and the night Kennedy visited, seven of them were sitting at the bottom of Norwegian fjords under a thin sheet of spring ice, and four others had been so badly damaged in the campaign, their future as fighting ships was in question. As the British destroyer fleet shrunk and the U-boat threat rose, Churchill had fixed his attention on the United States. At the beginning of the war, 170 American destroyers had been in drydock or otherwise out of action; 68 had since been returned to active duty, but that still left 102 destroyers unemployed. Churchill wanted the United States to loan Britain 40 or 50 of the old destroyers for convoy duty.