by John Kelly
“A deed without precedent.” For a moment that morning, Reynaud’s brave speech made Spears think the French would “stand by us to the end.” That illusion failed to survive a midmorning visit to the premier’s office. There was no harmonium-like telephone ringing this time, just Spears, his companion; Ronald Campbell, the British ambassador; and Reynaud, who introduced his guest to two new French proposals. Spears thought the first, a direct appeal to Roosevelt for “the urgent armed intervention of the United States,” gave off a fume of desperation. “We could not expect the Americans to declare war overnight,” he said, “. . . and to ask the impossible, knowing it was impossible, would give the impression we had given up hope. . . . Our people would think we were clutching at straws.”
Reynaud was astonished. The French people “would think he was doing exactly the right thing in appealing to the president.” The premier’s second proposal involved the Italian approach, which was proving a good deal more indestructible than the French Army. Reynaud said France was prepared to give Mussolini the names of the territories he would receive, in return for a pledge of Italian neutrality. Spears and Campbell knew this was a lie: Reynaud wanted the Duce to act as a mediator between the Allies and Hitler, but out of politeness—or maybe pity—they did not challenge him until Reynaud asked if Britain would match the great sacrifices France was prepared to make in its North African empire by offering concessions on Suez and Gibraltar. As Campbell tried to reason with the premier, Spears succumbed to a thought he had been resisting for days: “We were no longer one.”
There were other signs of Allied discord on this cheerless Tuesday morning. During an 11:00 a.m. visit to BEF headquarters on the Franco-Belgian border, General Blanchard, commander of the French forces in the northern pocket, was “horrified” to learn that the BEF had been ordered to evacuate back to Britain. This was the first Blanchard had heard of the plan. His orders from Weygand were to fall back on Dunkirk and make a final stand. An argument ensued, Gort insisting that the Belgian surrender had left the Allies with no alternatives but evacuation or surrender; Blanchard insisting that a retreat would mean the destruction of the French divisions defending Lille. As Gort and Blanchard argued back and forth, one of those events that often happen in films and only rarely in real life occurred. An emissary from General Prioux, commander of the Lille garrison, arrived. Prioux would have to hold his position for another day, the emissary said. His men were too exhausted to retreat that night. Gort turned to Blanchard: “For the sake of France, the French Army, and the Allied cause,” order Prioux to retreat now. Blanchard promised to talk to him, but he was still turning over Gort’s earlier announcement. “Tell me something, General,” he said. “If Prioux insists on holding his position for another day, will the BEF retreat, knowing the retreat will mean the destruction of the garrison? And leave the French units on the flanks of the BEF exposed to attack?” Gort repeated his earlier statement. His orders were to evacuate the BEF to Britain. For the next four days, the Lille garrison would defend the city and the southern rim of the corridor with such valor that, upon surrender on May 31, the Germans would afford the garrison the Honors of War. The British would be slower to publicly acknowledge the valiant French stand in Lille. In Their Finest Hour, published in 1949, Churchill finally gave the city’s defenders their due: “These Frenchmen . . . for four critical days contained no less than seven divisions. Which otherwise could have joined in the assaults on the Dunkirk perimeter. This was a splendid contribution to the escape of their more fortunate comrades and of the British Expeditionary Force.”
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On May 28, the first war cabinet of the day convened at 10:00 a.m., an hour before the Gort-Blanchard meeting, and Dunkirk dominated the agenda. On the second day of the evacuation, it was still too early to foresee the immense scale Operation Dynamo would take: 861 vessels, including a cruiser; 39 destroyers; 311 small craft; 9 corvettes and gunboats; and 2,739 aircraft. But even on the morning of the twenty-eighth, it was evident that an immense and perilous adventure was in the making. Except for the evacuation figures—11,400 men rescued overnight and another 2,500 that morning—the generals had nothing but bad news for the cabinet. General Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), reported that “Gort did not have enough troops” to close the gap [created by the Belgian surrender] and [would be unable to] prevent the Germans from breaking through to Dunkirk.” Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, head of Fighter Command, warned that the continuous patrols over the beaches had brought Fighter Command near to “the cracking point.” “If this exceptional effort [over Dunkirk] had to be repeated on the following days,” Dowding said, “the situation would be serious.” “Serious” from Dowding meant the Dunkirk losses could weaken Fighter Command’s ability to defend the home island. There was also a report that the SS Queen of the Channel, one of the ships evacuating troops, had been bombed off Dunkirk and was sinking; and that five to eight Panzer divisions, supported by several motorized units, were menacing the area around Hazebrouck, one of the last Allied strongpoints on the southern flank of the corridor.
Cassel, the hill town where the representatives of the French and British High Commands had met the day before, was not mentioned at the cabinet meeting, but on the morning of the twenty-eighth, the geography of the town—nine kilometers northwest of Hazebrouck—put it directly in the path of the German advance. The 145th Brigade, the rearguard British unit defending Cassel, was expecting an attack by evening, and it did not help brigade morale that Cassel’s hill town views allowed the men of the 145th to watch the German units in the flatlands below cut off their line of retreat to the beaches. The rain and the splattering of human remains in the town square—the result of a direct hit on a personnel carrier earlier in the day—were further drains on morale. Brigadier Nigel Somerset, the commander of the brigade, was the great-grandson of Lord Raglan, the man who had issued the order that resulted in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Now, unless withdrawal orders arrived soon, Somerset would be leading his own suicide mission. The London tabloids would love it, of course. Some fool of a newspaper editor would probably reprint Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” next to his obituary.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
On another morning, Somerset might have found some black humor in the intersection of family, fate, and Fleet Street, but not on that morning. He was angry for his men and angry for himself. The destruction of an entire brigade seemed an awful price to pay to buy a few extra hours for the British and French troops moving up the corridor. “We were the ‘Joe Soaps’ [scapegoats] of Dunkirk,” Somerset wrote later. “We were being sacrificed so that as many British and French [troops as possible] could get away from Dunkirk and get all the kudos for that. I felt very bitter about it.”I
In London, the war cabinet meeting adjourned at about eleven, and Churchill attended to some business before preparing for his lunch with Lloyd George. On another day the old Welshman’s wonderfully absurd white pompadour and cherubic face beaming with mischief and septuagenarian vanity would put a lift in Churchill’s day; however, for him as for Somerset, May 28 was not such a day. There was some truth in the official explanation for that day’s lunch and the two recent Churchill–Lloyd George meetings that had preceded it. The U-boat campaign was threatening food imports, and Lloyd George had some clever ideas about how to increase domestic food production. But, mostly, Churchill used the meetings to explore the old Welshman’s views on the war, which continued to be negative. In a long and cogent memorandum drawn up after the fall of France, Lloyd George would make what, in the context of summer 1940, seemed an unanswerable case for a compromise peace. The memorandum began with an audit of victory in the Great War. It had taken four years and nearly a million British and Empire dead; a million and a half French dead; nearly four million Russian dead; and hundreds of billio
ns of pounds, dollars, francs, and rubles (in 1918 money) to defeat Imperial Germany. Against Nazi Germany, Britain would enjoy none of the advantages it had had in 1914–18. It would have no allies; it would have to fight its way back onto the Continent, then wage a trench war–style battle of attrition that could take five to ten years. Even America’s entry into the war, increasingly viewed as Britain’s last best hope, would not dramatically improve the situation. In the Great War, it had taken the United States two years to build an army capable of meeting a European opponent; it was reasonable to assume it would take that long again. Under such circumstances, the memorandum concluded, the best outcome Britain could hope for in a German war was an extended season of death, followed by a pyrrhic victory that left the home islands devastated and depopulated, the British economy bankrupt, and the empire in the hands of the Americans, the Japanese, and the Russians.II
In late May, Lloyd George had yet to commit his thoughts to paper. Nonetheless, he had made no secret of his views. During the phony war he had argued that a compromise peace was the best path open to Britain; now, with the Germans on the French coast, he was arguing that it was the only path open to Britain.III Discretion not being among Lloyd George’s undoubted virtues, Churchill was probably aware of his guest’s intention to wait until “Winston went bust,” then replace him. On the theory that Lloyd George’s considerable capacity for mischief would be easier to control inside government than outside, over lunch, Churchill offered him a post at the Ministry of Agriculture.
Predictably, Lloyd George refused, and just as predictably, Neville Chamberlain was delighted that he did. Old men don’t always forget, especially old men with egos large enough to be designated world heritage sites. Twenty-three years on, Chamberlain, whose political support was essential to Churchill, still had not forgiven Lloyd George for undermining him when he was Director of National Service in 1917.
“My Dear Winston,” Lloyd George wrote the day after their lunch,
You were good enough to ask me yesterday if I would be prepared to enter the War Cabinet if you secured the adhesion of Mr. Chamberlain to the proposal. . . . I can well understand the reason for your hesitancy, for in the course of our interview you make it quite clear that if Chamberlain interposed his veto on the ground of personal resentment over past differences you could not proceed with the offer. This is not a firm offer. Until it is definite, I cannot consider it.
Before closing, Lloyd George could not resist taking a whack at Chamberlain.
Several architects of [the current] catastrophe are still leading members of your government and two of them [Chamberlain and Halifax] are in the Cabinet which directs the war.
Believe Me
DLG
Lloyd George’s “no” was not the end of this particular story. Churchill was aware that if the war continued to go badly, he would be dismissed and a prominent national figure such as Lloyd George or Halifax brought in to negotiate a settlement with Germany. Churchill may also have used the luncheon on the twenty-eighth to test Lloyd George’s fitness for office. The historian Paul Addison has argued that Churchill recognized that after the fall of France, Britain would be offered terms, and, as perhaps his most likely successor, he wanted to be sure Lloyd George, who was seventy-seven, still had the “root of the matter in him”—that is, he would refuse any terms that infringed on the independence of Britain.
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The Churchill–Lloyd George lunch and the Belgian surrender were not the only significant events on May 28. Around three that afternoon, the 2,500 troops evacuated from Dunkirk earlier in the day boarded the London train in the port town of Dover. Five days hence, the bottom half of the sixty-six-mile London-Dover rail line would be an unbroken stream of discarded postcards, ice cream cartons, bottles, orange peels, cigarette packs, belts, and helmets; and the citizens of Kent and Surrey and London would be gathered, in their thousands, along the line, shouting, “Well done, lads!” and “Vive la France!” at the passing trains. But on the afternoon of May 28, Churchill had yet to issue his bras-a-bras (arm and arm) order, which gave French units equal priority with British units in the evacuation schedule. To the French troops in Lille facing the final extremity, the evacuation remained a rumor, if they had heard of it at all.
Ashford, one of the first stops on the London–Dover line, knew nothing about Lille or about the anger the French troops felt on the beaches as they watched BEF units disappear into the holds of the Gracie Fields, The Maid of Kent, and the other Channel steamers of the Southern Railway. When the London train stopped at the town station on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, a battalion of white-haired matrons bearing fruit, biscuits, chocolate, beer, lemonade, jam, and cigarettes descended on the soldiers, who stepped off the train to stretch their legs. The low clouds and warm rain of morning had given way to an afternoon of patchy sunshine, and the station platform quickly filled to overcrowding with well-wishers. After the train left, Ashford would comment on how many of the young men had the same look about them: a disorderly face deeply browned by the French sun and bulging eyes that had “a wild or serious look”; and how they all seemed to speak of the same things: the long marches, sometimes on the double; the German ferocity; the injured civilians; the refugees obstructing the roads; the eye pain and breathing difficulties caused by the tear gas bombs the Luftwaffe was dropping on the beaches; and about the infrequent appearances of the RAF. This complaint owed something to Dowding’s wish to preserve as much of the fighter force as possible, and something to the RAF’s decision to intercept German air attacks before they reached the beaches, which often put British kills out of sight of the troops. The soldiers also spoke of “going to pieces a little” upon stepping back onto English soil, and of the parents, children, wives, brothers, and sisters they would visit on their forty-eight-hour leave. When the train pulled out of the station, two middle-aged railway workers gave the thumbs-up sign to the weary, unshaven young faces in the train windows.
Meanwhile, in London, members of the war cabinet were preparing for the afternoon session. Anticipating another confrontation, Churchill had used the concluding passages of his speech on the Belgian surrender to restate his argument for remaining in the war. He told the House that the Battle of France, though important, was only one battle in a contest whose decisive battle, the Battle of Britain, had yet to be fought. Then Churchill opened up his imagination and invited the House and the country in. The people of Britain, he said, were not just defending their towns and villages, not just defending the British nation and the British Empire. The sixty-year-old corporal, the nineteen-year-old mother on the lathe machine, and millions of ordinary Britons like them were defending something even more sacred, “the world cause.” “I have only to add, that nothing which may happen in this battle can in any way relieve us of our duty to defend the world cause to which we have vowed ourselves, nor should it destroy our confidence in our power to make our way, as on former occasions in our history, through disaster and through grief to the ultimate defeat of our enemies.” As Margery Allingham noted, Churchill’s particular genius as a leader lay in his ability to make people feel they had to rise to his level, which had the effect of making them a little bigger and braver than they were in ordinary life. Deputized defenders of the “World Cause,” milkmen, postal clerks, and housewives felt it a duty to fall in behind the prime minister. In this particular speech, however, Churchill was, subtly, also doing something else. By making the defense of the world cause a British mission, he was transforming the compromise peace option—historically an accepted diplomatic practice employed by many nations including Britain during the Napoleonic Wars—into an unacceptably shameful act.
The afternoon cabinet, which began promptly at four thirty, contained one new feature. The Italian approach was no longer spoken of in code as a way to keep Italy neutral or the French sweet. Everyone around the table knew the real purpose of the approach was to explore a negotiated settlement with Germany, had known it since th
e beginning of the debates. Now the ministers were prepared to speak openly and frankly about a subject they had mostly just alluded to in earlier discussions. Churchill was the first to rip off the fig leaf. He said the new French plan Reynaud had outlined to Spears the previous day was designed to lure Mussolini into a conversation, in hopes that it would lead to a conference along the lines of Munich. That would “put us on a slippery slope,” and he was determined not to fall into that trap. “Our position would be entirely different when Germany had made an unsuccessful attempt to invade this country.”
Halifax could find no sense in Churchill’s argument, not on a day when Britain had only three and a half fully trained and equipped divisions to meet the invasion threat. Assuming Mussolini wished to play the part of mediator, he said, “and . . . could produce terms that would not [infringe on] our independence later, we ought to be prepared to consider such terms.” Halifax admitted that “this hypothesis [enlisting Mussolini as a mediator] was a most unlikely one”; still, it was worth a try.
Archibald Sinclair, the air minister and a frequent guest at war cabinet meetings, said “there is no possible chance” of Britain receiving “acceptable terms” at the present moment.