by John Kelly
He also approached Roosevelt again. The president, who had said no to his first request for the loan of forty or fifty destroyers for convoy duty, said no again, citing congressional opposition and US naval needs in the Pacific. But domestic concerns were not the only reason for Roosevelt’s reluctance on the destroyer issue. The president’s personal knowledge of Churchill was limited to the letters the two men had exchanged since the beginning of the war. Most of what Roosevelt knew about Churchill he got secondhand from the reports of officials in his administration, and much of it concerned Churchill’s alcohol consumption. Joe Kennedy frequently enlivened his cables to Washington with colorful descriptions of Churchill’s drinking; but, aware of Kennedy’s defeatism, Roosevelt did not attach much importance to the ambassador’s views. Roosevelt did listen to Adolf Berle, a strait-laced corporate lawyer who was an assistant secretary of state, and to Sumner Welles, also an assistant secretary of state. On May 5, five days before Churchill became prime minister, Berle wrote: “The rumor . . . going around here is that [Churchill] is drunk all the time. Welles says on the first two evenings he saw Churchill, he was quite drunk. I asked [Welles] whether he saw any indications of clear cut leadership [in Churchill] and Welles answered that he saw none.” Over the summer, Churchill’s heroic leadership would put Roosevelt’s reservations about his drinking to rest, but not the president’s reservations about bringing the US into the war. Roosevelt knew it would take a year or more to train and equip an American army up to a European standard; and like Lincoln, who waited for the South to fire the first shot, he may have felt the only way to ensure a divided America entered the war united was to await an unprovoked attack by Germany or Japan.
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“Victory! Victory at all costs!” Churchill’s war policy had a thrilling ring to it; it was almost an epic poem in itself. But was it a realistic policy for a nation with a small endangered army (which could mobilize only ten divisions for the defense of France) and an overextended navy—a fragile empire with an ally who had begun the war with more than ninety divisions and whose surrender would remove from battle a force that was still many times larger than Britain’s? Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, who thought in prose, not poetry, believed it was not. While Churchill was in Paris, Chamberlain told Joe Kennedy that without France, an Allied victory was impossible. The next day, in a conversation with Sam Hoare, the air minister, Chamberlain sounded even more defeatist. Hoare told friends that Chamberlain was claiming that “everything [was] finished,” that “the USA [was] no good,” and that “we could never get our army out, or if we did, it would be without equipment.” General Ironside was also pessimistic about Britain’s prospects if France fell. “Could we maintain the Air Struggle?” he wrote in his diary after the cabinet meeting on May 17. “Could we get enough machines to continue? Could we keep our industry going under Nazi bombardment from so close as Holland and the Channel ports? Could I get enough of the B.E.F., men and equipment, back to England to ensure security against air invasion?” The Evening Standard’s May 18 editorial “Faith” was well timed. That was also the day it became clear that Gamelin’s hypothesis was correct: The Germans planned to trap and destroy the British and French troops in the North—the cream of the Allied Army—before turning on Paris. “A miracle may save us,” Alex Cadogan wrote. “Otherwise we’re done.”
By the third week of May, several leading members of the old British ruling class—men who bore historic titles such as the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Westminster, the Duke of Buccleuch, and Lord Tavistock—were quietly agitating for a compromise peace. “If the Germans received fair peace terms, a dozen Hitlers could never start another war,” Tavistock insisted. Indeed, in the House of Lords, the political home of the old ruling class, appeasers were so thick on the ground that before giving an address to the Upper House in mid-May, Lord Hanky said he would be speaking to “most of the members of the Fifth Column” in Britain. In addition to Lloyd George, who still appeared to be holding himself in readiness to parley with the Germans, the list of prominent commoners who favored a compromise peace included Richard Stokes, an influential Labour businessman; and the thirty MPs and ten peers who belonged to the Stokes group and who, like Stokes, looked to Lloyd George to negotiate an end to the war. Other opponents of Churchill’s “Victory at all costs!” policy included Basil Liddel Hart, the most influential British military writer of the interwar years; Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England; the prominent actors John Gielgud and Sybil Thorndike; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and a significant minority of ordinary Britons. In April, Mass Observation estimated that 10 percent of the population continued to oppose the war, but in some localities the percentage was higher. In early May, a pacifist candidate named Annie Maxton won a surprising 25 percent of the vote in a solidly conservative Scottish constituency, running under a slogan that slyly mocked the bellicosity of her opponent, a retired army major:
“1918, Never Again, 1940, Oh yeah!”
However, only the two “wise old elephants”—Chamberlain and Halifax—were in a position to influence British war policy. Both men were prepared to keep fighting even if France fell, if the only alternative was unconditional surrender and a German occupation. But was that the only alternative? While Chamberlain was prepared to explore the question, it was Halifax who—untainted by a recent political disgrace—emerged as the principal spokesman for testing the possibilities of a compromise peace. With everything Britain possessed, the work of centuries at stake; with the life of the nation at stake, the foreign secretary felt it was the duty of the war cabinet to do so. This put him at odds with Churchill, who felt Hitler and the German aggression had put everything Britain stood for in the world at stake. Thus were set the terms for one of the most historic debates of the twentieth century.
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I. The Times reporter was Kim Philby, who would later earn notoriety as a Soviet spy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A CERTAIN EVENTUALITY
On the morning of May 19, a British staff officer, sturdy of build and hard of eye, arrived in Dunkirk, a resort town on the Franco-Belgian border. Normally, at this time of year, the local shops and beaches would be crowded with tourists from Brussels and Lille, but the morning General Henry Pownall arrived, the only civilians in view were a packet of refugees huddled near the Leughenaer, a medieval tower and, in better times, a popular tourist attraction. The Luftwaffe had been over at first light, and the refugees were scavenging through the rubble of a bombed-out building for foodstuffs and household goods. Most of the scavengers had been on the road for days and looked it. They were unwashed and exhausted, but even in their present disheveled state notably better dressed than the Chinese, Spanish, and Polish refugees who had been tramping through newsreels for the past decade. That was one of the novelties of war in middle-class countries—well-dressed refugees. When Pownall’s staff car arrived at the French command post near the harbor, silos of angry black clouds were billowing up from the docks—another reminder of the Luftwaffe’s early morning visit. A French soldier at the gate examined Pownall’s ID, then waved him through. When his staff car stopped at a communication center a few hundred feet away, Pownall was still rehearsing what he would tell the War Office.
During the first days of the German offensive, the French and Belgians had borne the weight of the battle and had sustained casualties commensurate with that distinction. Then, in the second week, the German trap snapped shut, and the BEF, which had suffered only five hundred casualties in the first seven days of fighting, found itself confronted with the prospect of annihilation. One German army was approaching from the east, another from the south. “I am afraid I am not at all feeling optimistic today,” Sir John Gort, the BEF’s commander, wrote his wife on the morning of the nineteenth. Then he dispatched Pownall, his chief of staff, to Dunkirk, the nearest town still in telephone contact with London. When the director of military operations came on the line, Pownall said Gort wanted to retreat t
o Dunkirk and “fight it out with his back to the sea.” The word “evacuation” was not mentioned, but Gort’s request to fall back to a Channel port indicated that that is what he had in mind.
Until Pownall’s call, the prime minister’s Sunday had been relatively peaceful. When Mrs. Churchill came home complaining about the pacifist sermon her vicar had preached, Churchill briefly lost his temper and bellowed, “You ought to have cried, ‘Shame, desecrating the House of God with lies!’ ” But then the soothing rhythms of a Sunday morning reasserted themselves, and the prime minister’s mind filled with thoughts of Chartwell, his country house in Kent. A few hours later, he was standing by a pond on the estate, about to feed a bag of ant eggs to his one remaining black swan—the local foxes had claimed the others—when the phone rang in the main house. It was an indication of the concern Pownall’s call had aroused at the War Office that the police car sent to pick up Churchill ran all the red lights between Chartwell and London and kept the siren on for the entire trip.
General Ironside’s day had also been disrupted by the Pownall call. Two plans had been drawn up to meet the eventuality facing the BEF: the one that Gort favored, an evacuation by sea, and the one Ironside favored, the BEF fights its way out of the northern pocket and rejoins the Allied armies to the south. Even a successful evacuation would be costly, Ironside knew. Most of the BEF’s heavy equipment—tanks, trucks, and artillery guns and probably most of its troops—would have to be abandoned on the beaches. The political consequences of an evacuation would also be tremendous. The French would cry “betrayal!” and “perfidious Albion!” American skepticism about an Allied victory would deepen, and opinion in the dominions, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand, would be badly shaken. When the war cabinet convened that afternoon, Churchill endorsed Ironside’s view. A BEF retreat to the south would put the Belgian Army on the British flank in jeopardy, he acknowledged; however, this was no time for sentimentality. Britain was in a war of national survival, and “we should do [the Belgians] no service by sacrificing our army.”
That evening, in a radio broadcast, Churchill returned to the theme of national survival.
I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister in a solemn hour for our country, for our Empire, for our Allies, and, above all, for the cause of freedom. A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders. The Germans . . . have broken through the French defenses north of the Maginot Line, and strong columns of their armored vehicles . . . have penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion. Behind them are now appearing infantry columns, and behind them again the large masses are moving forward. We must expect that . . . soon . . . the bulk of that hideous apparatus of aggression . . . will be turned on us. . . .
Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: “Arm yourself and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven so let it be.”
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The next morning, when Ironside arrived at Gort’s headquarters in northern France, he was reassured by the sense of good order in the camp—staff officers darting into and out of tents, the other ranks assembling for breakfast, mess kits in hand. Except for the faint rumble of artillery fire from the north, the only sounds heard were the low murmurs of morning voices and birdsong from a grove of trees near the mess tent. Inside the headquarters building, a note card tacked to a door announced: “Office of C-in-C.” When Ironside entered, John Standish Surtees Prendergast Vereker, the sixth Viscount Gort, was seated behind a makeshift desk—a plank supported by two trestles—examining a map. Gort had as many medals as he had names (six), a mixed reputation as a commander, and the distinction of being among the handful of men who could lose the war for Britain in a week. The BEF not only represented the flower of the British army but also “its root, branch, and stem.” Its destruction would leave no cadre of experienced officers and NCOs to train the new conscript army; of more urgent importance, it would leave no cadre of trained men to meet a German invasion.
After explaining the advantages of a breakout, Ironside asked Gort if he saw the plan as a “possible solution.” Gort said he did not. Most of the BEF was heavily engaged behind Brussels. “A withdrawal south . . . however desirable in principle, was not in the circumstances practical.” The most Gort would commit to was a limited attack south by two divisions. As Ironside was leaving, Gort said he still favored his “last alternative.” Events were quickly making that alternative—evacuation—the only alternative. On the morning of the twentieth the Panzer columns that breached the Meuse a week earlier reached the Channel. From one end of France to the other, a fifteen-mile-wide German corridor filled with tanks, tank destroyers, mobile artillery units, and infantry divisions now separated the Allied armies in the north from those in the south. The next day the Panzers would swing north and drive up the coast. A week hence, the Channel ports of Boulogne and Calais would be in flames, and suntanned German soldiers would be posing for newsreel cameras in front of abandoned British tanks with names such as “Excalibur,” “Valiant,” and “Indomitable.” Two weeks hence, the newsreels would be flickering across movie screens in the United States, Sweden, Argentina, and other neutral nations.
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On May 22, Reynaud appointed two Great War heroes to his government. He introduced Philippe Pétain, who needed no introduction, to a somber National Assembly as “the Victor of Verdun,” and General Maxime Weygand, who had been recalled from North Africa to replace Gamelin, as the man “who had halted the German onslaught . . . in 1918.” Pétain’s remit was to restore public confidence in the Reynaud government; Weygand’s, to reproduce the “Miracle on the Marne,” the Allied victory that had checked the German drive on Paris in 1914. A military miracle was a great deal to ask of a seventy-three-year-old man; but as the small, physically elegant Weygand lost no opportunity to demonstrate, he was not a typical seventy-three-year-old. On his first day as commander in chief, he astonished the staff at Vincennes, by bounding down a flight of stairs, four at a time, then vaulting out to the lawn and running a hundred-yard dash. “Instead of ectoplasm, we [have] a man!” exclaimed one young French captain.
Churchill was no less impressed by France’s miraculous septuagenarian. “The only fault with you—you are too young,” he told the general when he visited Vincennes on the afternoon of the twenty-second to be briefed on the “Weygand plan.” In a swift, daring pincer movement, the general planned to reunite the Allied armies in the north and south and to blunt the Panzer spearhead by punching a hole through the German corridor. “At the earliest moment—certainly tomorrow,” the British and French units in the northern pocket would attack southward into the corridor and “join hands” with a new French Army group of eighteen to twenty divisions, attacking northward from bases outside the pocket. In London, reaction to the Weygand plan ran the gamut. Churchill was excited. “Provided the French fought well, there seemed a good prospect of success,” he told the war cabinet. Ironside was lukewarm. “When it came down to things, the plan was still all projets [projects].” Gort hated the plan. Upon receiving a copy, he exploded, “How is an attack like this . . . to be staged in an hour’s notice?. . . . The man [Churchill] is mad. I suppose these figments of the imagination are telegraphed without consulting his advisers.” Alec Cadogan of the Foreign Office suspended judgment. “Counter offensive should start tomorrow,” he wrote in his diary on the night of the twenty-second. “But will the French fight?”
The next day Churchill called Paris several times to inquire about the progress of the Weygand offensive, but he was unable to get a clear answer. No one seemed to know what had happened to the eighteen to twenty divisions the general had promised for the attack in the south. Finally, a little before five, Churchill called Reynaud and said that perhaps it would be “better if the British army fought in retreat toward the co
ast.” “We must go on!” [italics in original] Reynaud insisted. An hour later, Weygand called Churchill. The attack was not only in progress, the general said; three key towns—Amiens, Albert, and Perrone—had been recaptured. Weygand was even more expansive in a conversation with Ironside. Not only had Amiens, Albert, and Perrone been recaptured, but also “the maneuver was continuing under good conditions.” The most charitable thing that can be said about Weygand’s report is that it was wildly misleading. As yet, Churchill had no way of knowing that, but he seemed to sense the general was dissembling—maybe a little, maybe a great deal. He could not be sure yet, but during a visit to Buckingham Palace on the evening of the twenty-third, he told the king that an evacuation of the BEF by sea might still be necessary.
“I suppose you’re pretty busy just now, plenty of people sailing and all that.” It was the morning of May 23, and a British officer on his way to Calais was talking to a transport sergeant in Portsmouth Harbor. “Not many sailing,” the sergeant said, “but they’ll be plenty coming home. If you ask me, [your] regiment is going the wrong way.” Of the three Channel ports with the facilities to support a large-scale evacuation, Boulogne was only a few hours away from falling on the morning of the twenty-third, and Calais, nineteen miles north of Boulogne, maybe a day or two away. British soldiers were shooting French soldiers in cellars; decomposing bodies were stacked like cordwood under billboards for Dior perfumes and Renault automobiles; and panicked refugees were pushing cars into the harbor. At 3:00 a.m. on the morning of the twenty-fourth, Brigadier Claude Nicholson, the British commander in Calais, was notified that his units would be evacuated “when you have finished unloading MTs [motor transports].” A few hours later, the evacuation was postponed. Calais would be defended to buy time for the BEF’s last potential evacuation site, Dunkirk.