by John Kelly
“The final debacle cannot be long delayed,” General Ironside wrote when the news from Calais came through. No “more than a minute portion of the BEF . . . [can be evacuated and they will have to abandon] all the equipment we are so short of in this country. . . . We shall have lost practically all our trained soldiers in the next few days unless a miracle appears to help us. . . . Horrible days we live through.”
The loss of the BEF was one of the two existential threats facing Britain in the final week of May 1940. The other was a French surrender. Churchill first realized that that had become a serious possibility during his visit to Paris on May 16. Those old gentlemen in the courtyard of the Quai d’Orsay were not burning documents to keep warm. Upon returning to London, he asked Chamberlain to form a study group to examine “the situation in which we might find ourselves obliged to continue our resistance single handed in this country.” Inside of that tortured sentence was a simple question: what resources would Britain require to carry on the battle alone? The Chamberlain study group took only twenty-four hours to arrive at an answer. Britain would need massive amounts of American aid and a “form of government which would approach totalitarian.”
On May 25, the Chiefs of Staff also presented the war cabinet with an appreciation of Britain’s prospects in an Anglo-German war. Called British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality (the eventuality being the fall of France), the report had the same lineage as Chamberlain’s study. It grew out of a request by Churchill, who gave the chiefs the same remit he had given Chamberlain: examine the resources Britain would need to carry on the war alone. However, Eventuality was so intelligent and comprehensive, it indirectly answered a question Churchill had reserved for himself: should Britain continue to pursue war on its own?
Eventuality opened on an apocalyptic note. Upon the collapse of France, it asserted, “the main objective of German policy [would be] the rapid elimination of resistance in the United Kingdom,” either by:
(a) unrestricted air attack aimed at breaking down public morale;
(b) starvation of this country by attack on shipping and ports;
(c) occupation of the United Kingdom by invasion.
Or by some combination of the three.
“From the very first weeks of a French collapse,” the report noted, “the United Kingdom and its sea approaches will be exposed at short range to the concentrated attack of the whole of the German Naval and Air Forces operating from bases extending from Norway to the North West of France.” In the event that Germany chose the third option, a land invasion, the thirteen and a half British divisions—all but three partially trained and partially equipped—available for home defense would face an invasion force of seventy or more well-armed German divisions. Eventuality came to two conclusions about Britain’s prospects. The first: In the long term Britain did not have “any chance of success” unless “the United States of America is willing to give us full economic and financial support.” The second conclusion addressed Britain’s short-term prospects. In the year or so it would take the United States to mobilize its war machine, four factors would determine national survival. These were:
(a) “whether the morale of our people will withstand the strain of air bombardment;
(b) “whether it will be possible to import the absolute essential minimum of commodities necessary to sustain life and keep our war industries in action;
(c) “our capacity to resist invasion;
(d) “whether our fighter defense are able to reduce the scale of attack.”
The four standards provided a reasonably objective way to assess whether Britain possessed the capacity to bear the struggle alone for an extended period. In the Chiefs’ view, if morale held, the RAF maintained air superiority over the home island, and their other criterion were met, there was a good chance Britain would still be standing when the US, the dominions, and the empire were fully mobilized. The dangers enumerated in Eventuality also left little doubt about Britain’s fate if the criterion could not be met.
The British people knew nothing of Eventuality, of course, but the human mind can understand without knowing. And the desperate battles in Calais and Boulogne, the sound of the heavy guns echoing across the Channel, the new wave of evacuations to the countryside, the tank traps and parachute traps, the suddenly vanished road signs, the sixty-year-old privates and corporals guarding checkpoints all said the situation was desperate. Even many committed optimists were shaken by the Evening Standard’s change of tune in a May 24 editorial. “Faith” in ultimate victory was apparently no longer sufficient. “Prepare for the worst,” the paper counseled. The war felt very near now, and the danger, personal. Mass Observation’s morale report of May 24 spoke of rumors of midnight German parachute landings and fifth columnists, of secret weapons caches, and of last good-byes. Henry Channon, determined to preserve his diaries for posterity, buried them in a local churchyard. One trend MO failed to pick up was the funny tricks the war was playing on people’s minds. Attending a memorial service for a friend on May 23, Vera Brittain imagined herself at a requiem for “European civilization, suicidally destroying itself and now unable to arrest the fearful tide of slaughter,” while Margery Allingham found herself unable to compose a simple letter anymore. Would the person Margery was writing to still be alive when the letter arrived? Would Margery still be alive when her letter arrived? The questions put her in a terrible muddle.
Nonetheless, public expressions of fear remained rare. On the afternoon of May 24, Chiswick High Street in southwestern London was crowded with shoppers and young mothers gossiping in outdoor cafés; Margate, with day-trippers; and the lawns of Hyde Park, with secretaries, their skirts rolled up to their knees to catch the noonday sun. At kiosks and newsstands across Britain, twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys ogled “Jane,” the Daily Express’s pretty young secret agent (depicted in the cartoon of that name) who daily saved the British Empire in her underwear. Visiting Regents Park in London, one woman was surprised by the prewar atmosphere. “A few elderly people . . . sit on chairs, a few young ones sailing in boats with striped sails . . . a vast green field very vivid.” It’s just like a prewar Sunday, she told her husband. As the summer progressed, the propagandists at the Ministry of Information would weave the tranquil parks, the sunning secretaries, and the Margate day-trippers into a narrative of an Eternal England, where fortitude and a stiff upper lip were part of the national heritage. To Margery, that was just another example of the ministry talking out of its hat. In her village, stiff upper lips were the rule, but they reflected not an imperviousness to fear but a desperate attempt to control it. “The danger was so close, the appalling size of the smash up so apparent that the only thing to do was to do what everyone else was doing, keep . . . steady eyes front. Once you looked sideways, once you looked around, once you let your imagination out, you knew you might lose your head. Clearly the thing to do was to get yourself into a definite frame of mind and keep it, even if it made you slightly stupid.”
* * *
On Saturday, May 25, Britain awoke to a set of alarming headlines in the Daily Express:
GERMAN TROOPS REPORTED IN CALAIS
SMOKE THREE MILES HIGH DRIFTS OVER THE CHANNEL
and a sermon in the Times:
In every crisis of their fate, [the British people]
Have . . . never placed their trust in
Their strength alone. The nation is called . . . to seek the ultimate
Support where our fathers sought it, from the right hand
of God.
Despite the alarming headlines, the war seemed very far away during Edward Spears’s flight to Paris that morning. The sea below the two-engine Blenheim was as “blue as the Mediterranean”; the sunlight on the wing, as golden as an ear of June corn. Until an RAF sergeant ordered him to “keep a sharp lookout” for enemy aircraft, Spears could almost imagine he was flying to Paris for a holiday weekend. Half an hour later, the French coast came up, and the Blenheim passed over a patchwork
of neatly squared fields of gold and green, then over church steeples, rooftops, and village squares. Toward Paris, the war reappeared. The roads were pockmarked with bomb craters and dense with refugees—hundreds at first, then thousands; then, toward the western approaches to Paris, tens of thousands.
In his youth, Spears had known France as a student and soldier; later, as a businessman and politician (and, it was rumored, as an intelligence agent). This morning he was returning as Winston Churchill’s personal representative to Reynaud, and he was taking up the post at a delicate moment in Anglo-French relations. Paris and London had spent the better part of the previous day blaming each other for the failure of the Weygand offensive. In the French version, the plan failed because Gort had pulled the BEF back toward the Channel coast instead of attacking the northern side of the German corridor. “Many people now quite openly blame the whole horrible fiasco on the British High Command,” said Clare Boothe, who was in Paris that May. In the British version, the plan failed because the eighteen to twenty French divisions Weygand promised never materialized. The Mass Observation report for May 24 had noted a “great increase and sometimes intense violence of criticism against the French.” Officially, Spears’s remit was to promote Anglo-French understanding by serving as a conduit between Churchill and Reynaud; unofficially, it was to keep France in the war as long as possible.
In Paris as in London, there were barrage balloons overhead, antiaircraft guns in the parks, and sandbags surrounding government buildings. But in London it was still possible to catch glimpses of the prewar city beneath the battle dress. In Paris, it was not. The sparkle and vivacity were gone. When Spears arrived in the city at about noon on the twenty-fifth, Paris was entombed in a somber Good Friday quiet. There were no buses on the streets and barely any taxicabs. On the Seine, empty tourist boats sailed back and forth under a May sun, and on the empty quays above the river booksellers sat in collapsible chairs, napping. A good part of the city had melted away to the roads and railway stations, and the residents who remained seemed listless and depressed. Attending a prayer service at Notre Dame, the French senator Achilles Bardoux was struck by the apathy of the congregants. The “stricken and silent crowd has lost its voice so that it can no longer even sing the ‘Marseillaise.’ The shadow of 1870 [the year Prussia defeated France] is spreading over the country.” In a Paris bistro, two women listening to Reynaud’s radio broadcast burst into tears and shouted “les salauds! les salauds!” (the bastards! the bastards!).
Spears’s first stop that afternoon was the Ministry of Defense, where Reynaud kept an office. (Like Churchill, he was his own defense minister.) The premier greeted Spears with an accusation: “British generals always made for harbors.” Next, the “harmonium-like” telephone on Reynaud’s desk rang; after that, it never seemed to stop ringing. Several of the calls were from the Comtesse de Portes; several others, from favor seekers. Between calls, Spears tried to tell a story about a childhood incident to illustrate the dangers of Allied disunity. “Once, as a boy,” he told Reynaud, “I had seen a large cage full of rats thrown into water. After trying madly to escape, their last choking action had been to tear each other apart. I have never forgotten the horrible sight. Later . . . I understood the lesson.” It was a good story, but it would have had a greater impact if the phone had stopped ringing and Spears had controlled his anger. Fourteen years later, he was still complaining about the incident in his memoirs. “The Chairman of a reputable Board in the City of London would never allow himself to be interrupted at a meeting where he was discussing the price of soap. [And] here we were, when the fate of France hung in the balance, interfered with in this way.”
An hour later Spears was seated in the elegant, high-ceilinged salon with several members of the French War Committee (the rough equivalent of the war cabinet). The first speaker that afternoon was a feral-looking French major named Fauvelle. General Georges Blanchard, the commander of the Allied forces in the North, had sent Fauvelle to Paris to brief the War Committee on conditions in the pocket. Fauvelle’s appearance almost made the briefing superfluous. “I have seen, in my time, broken men,” Spears wrote later, “but never before one . . . fit to be scraped up by a spoon or mop.” Fauvelle, who seemed oblivious to the effect he was having on his listeners, began bluntly. “I believe in a very early capitulation. The troops have no bread . . . the heavy artillery has been lost. Horse drawn transport no longer exists as all horses have been killed by air bombardment. There is little ammunition. There are no armored vehicles left [and] troop movements have been incredibly hampered by the flow of refugees.” When Fauvelle finished, General Weygand turned to Reynaud with “a look of absolute exasperation” and said, “This war is sheer madness; we have gone to war with a 1918 army against a German army of 1939. It is sheer madness.” Visiting the British embassy that evening, Spears told Oliver Harvey, a Foreign Office official, “Gort’s only hope is to get to the coast.”
* * *
In London, there was no talk of capitulation on May 25, but there was a serious discussion about negotiating an end to the war. That the testing began on May 25 was not happenstance. Halifax had been shaken by A Certain Eventuality, and, quite by chance, the cabinet’s itinerary that morning included an invitation from Signore Paresci, the press secretary at the Italian embassy in London. The invitation was unexpected. All hope of reaching an Anglo-Italian concord seemed to die on May 17, when Mussolini responded to a conciliatory note from Churchill with bared teeth: “The Italian-German Treaty guides Italian policy today and tomorrow in the face of any event whatsoever.” Now, Paresci appeared to be reopening the door to talks. Through a Foreign Office official, the press secretary intimated that a new British approach to Italy would not be unwelcome.
Probably nothing would come of it, Halifax told Churchill at the morning cabinet meeting, but Halifax said that about almost everything. For a man of his class, it was common and a bit low to appear anything but disinterested. Nonetheless, Halifax was interested in the invitation. That same day, the twenty-fifth, or possibly the day before or after, he drafted a cable to Roosevelt in Churchill’s name. Either because Churchill objected to it or for some other reason, the cable was never sent, but it offers a glimpse into Halifax’s state of mind in late May. The cable requested that in the event of a complete Allied collapse, America intervene with Hitler on Britain’s behalf. Halifax may have seen Paresci’s invitation as another avenue of approach to Berlin, but at the morning cabinet meeting on the twenty-fifth he made a case for accepting the invitation on the grounds that Anglo-Italian talks would encourage the French, and even if the talks went nowhere, they would buy the Allies a little time. Churchill, who had more pressing matters on his mind that morning, said he had “no objections” to talking to the Italians. A few hours later, Giuseppe Bastianini, the “well mannered and conciliatory” Italian ambassador, visited the Foreign Office. The brief of their meeting that Halifax drew up later shows that fairly quickly he steered his Italian visitor away from the subject Bastianini wished to discuss—preserving Italy’s neutrality—to the topic Halifax wished to discuss: Italy mediating a settlement between Germany and the Allies. Fluent in the elliptical language of diplomacy, Halifax used illusion and implication to say what could not be said openly. He quotes himself as proposing that Mussolini reprise the “honest broker” role he had played at Munich and almost played again at the outbreak of the war the previous September. At another point, he has himself telling Bastianini, “If any discussions were to be held with a view to resolving European questions and building a peaceful Europe . . . matters which caused anxiety to Italy must certainly be discussed as part of a general European settlement.” According to Andrew Roberts, Halifax’s biographer, “general European settlement” was code for a quid pro quo. Britain would consider Italian claims on Suez, Gibraltar, and Malta and encourage Paris to consider Italian claims on Algeria and Tunis in return for Italian help in facilitating a negotiated settlement with Germany. Bastianini, wh
o was also fluent in the elliptical language of diplomacy, seemed happy to play the game. “If such a conference were held,” the ambassador asked, would His Majesty’s government “consider it possible to discuss general questions, involving not only Great Britain and Italy but other countries?” Halifax said it was difficult “to visualize . . . a widespread discussion [of international concerns] while the war was still on.”
“Once such a discussion began, the war would be pointless,” Bastianini replied.
Halifax left the meeting feeling it had been “not unsatisfactory.” Bastianini left it feeling that the foreign secretary had been a little too elliptical. Later that afternoon Paresci told a Foreign Office contact that Lord Halifax had not advanced any specific proposals and that his discussion of the territories Italy might receive in a general settlement lacked “geographical precision.” The meeting had “rated” (miscarried), Paresci said. Paresci’s Foreign Office contact was sent back to the press secretary with orders to make a better impression.
How much Churchill knew about all this is unclear. He may have read Halifax’s report on the Bastianini meeting and the cable Halifax had written in his name, but on a day that Alec Cadogan described as “black as black,” it is unlikely that Churchill gave much thought to anything except the war. The previous day, the twenty-fourth, a series of ferocious German attacks had brought the Panzers so near to Dunkirk that General Wilhelm von Toma, chief of the Panzer section at the OKH (German Army High Command), could see the town from his staff car. It should have been a moment of triumph for von Toma; one last push and the British and French would be on the beaches, trapped between the Panzers and the Luftwaffe. But all he felt was frustration. Just before noon on the twenty-fourth Hitler had ordered the Panzers to halt in place. “You can’t talk to a fool,” Toma told a colleague when Hitler ignored his protest. Seventy years on, historians still debate why Hitler issued the order. At different times, he offered different explanations. At one point he said that he “did not want to send the tanks into the Flanders marshes”; another time, that the British were finished and “would not be back in this war.”