by John Kelly
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A little before 4:00 a.m. on Thursday, May 30, the telephone rang in Edward Spears’s Paris apartment. An hour later, the prime minister’s special representative to France was standing by a window in the British embassy on the rue du Saint-Honoré reading a cable from Churchill. Outside, the thin morning light was creeping across the embassy lawn, absorbing the dew on the freshly mowed grass. Over the past thirty-six hours, Spears’s frustrated outburst about the state of the Anglo-French alliance—“We were no longer one”—had gone from a premonition to a truth foretold. The day before, Reynaud did not complain about the war cabinet’s rejection of the new French peace initiative when Spears visited him, but that was about the only British action he did not complain about. London’s mild response to the Belgain surrender, the BEF’s precipitous withdrawal to the beaches, and its by-product: dozens of French units left with their flanks flapping in the air, including the three French divisions trapped in Lille: Reynaud had a large collection of British perfidies on hand, and he held each one up to the light and invited Spears to inspect it with him.
Churchill’s cable was intended to address the complaints. Henceforth, French troops would “share in evacuation to fullest possible extent”; the Admiralty would aid the French Navy, as required; and upon its reconstitution the BEF would return to France. The cable also included an instruction to Spears; he was to deliver it “forthwith to Reynaud.” But where to find the premier at five o’clock on a Thursday morning? A duty officer at one of the French ministries suggested Reynaud’s apartment at the Palace du Palais Bourbon. When Spears arrived at 7:00 a.m., there were no female garments hanging about, as there had been on previous occasions—just Reynaud in a kimono, doing his morning exercises. It says something about Spears’s state of mind that morning that he found nothing odd about that.
The first point in the Churchill cable—“French troops to share in evacuation to fullest possible extent”—occasioned a sharp exchange. “Sourly, almost sarcastically,” Reynaud said that he was very glad Churchill had emphasized that “the French would be evacuated in equal numbers”; otherwise, it would be necessary to déchaîne (unleash) French opinion against Britain. Spears, who was still more soldier than diplomat, did not help the cause of Allied unity by replying that only Churchill’s “strong hand [had] prevented British opinion being déchaîne against the French Command and the French generally.” The two men stared at each other for a moment; then Reynaud said, in “a tone [Spears] had never heard him use [before] when talking of Churchill . . . that his resentment was as deep as was his incomprehension of the Prime Minister’s attitude toward the King of the Belgians.”
At the morning meeting of the French War Committee, which convened two hours later, General Weygand appeared in a new role. He was now the mortician who, having prepared the grave site, was anxiously awaiting delivery of the corpse. He told the committee that once the Germans turned south and pushed through the French defenses on the Somme–Aisne line (the last major defensive line before Paris) the army “would go on fighting, but he could not see where organized resistance could take place.” Leaving the meeting, Spears felt a hand on his arm. When he turned around, Weygand was staring at him. “Send us everything you’ve got,” he whispered. When the Germans turn south after the Dunkirk operation, the 43 to 50 French divisions defending the approaches to Paris would be facing 150 divisions. That night, Spears wrote in his memoirs, “I was overcome . . . by a feeling akin to despair. . . . It seemed suddenly unbearable to see at close hand the France I had cared for so much collapsing before my eyes. For a moment, I felt the madness that would come to a living being chained to the body of a loved creature dissolving in death.”
In London, the absence of further debate on a negotiated settlement after Churchill’s performance before the outer cabinet on May 28 became a source of rumor, innuendo, and speculation. Had the debate just petered out of its own accord? Had the war cabinet reached a secret accord? Or did the hiatus foreshadow a purge of Halifax and Chamberlain? Henry Channon’s theory was that the silence presaged “a definite plot . . . to oust Halifax and all the other gentlemen of England from the Cabinet.” Alec Cadogan was agnostic about the reasons for the cabinet’s silence, but during “a horrible discussion of what instructions to send Gort” on the twenty-ninth, he had noticed a lot of tension among Churchill, Halifax, and Chamberlain. “W.S.C. [Churchill] rather theatrically bulldoggish. Opposed by N.C. [Chamberlain] and H. [Halifax]. Fear relations will become rather strained. That is Winston’s fault, theatricality.”
May 30, like every other day since May 10, began in crisis. By noon, 80,000 men had been evacuated, a better-than-expected result. But Fighter Command’s decision to put larger but fewer air patrols over Dunkirk had made the already perilous air situation more perilous. At 8:15 a.m. the destroyer Vimy on station off Dunkirk cabled London: “Request continuous fighter action in the air. No more Beauforts [a slow, porky twin-engined torpedo bomber] left. If these conditions [are] . . . not complied with, a scandal, repetition, scandal, reflecting on the present British Cabinet will pass to History.” Thirty-five minutes later, the Admiralty Operations center in Dover received a request from Lieutenant Fletcher, a naval officer in Dunkirk: Small “boats urgently required. Only two whalers, one cutter, one motor boat, and about 60,000 soldiers to embark. Matter most urgent.”
Stories like Fletcher’s would not find any place in the saga of the “little boats” created by the writer and broadcaster J. B. Priestley, whose cozy Yorkshire voice had the same effect on his wartime audience as warm milk on a cold night. “We’ve known them and laughed at them, all our lives,” Priestley said in an early June broadcast, praising the role of the small boats in the evacuation. “We’ve called them the ‘shilling sicks.’ We have watched them load and unload their crowd of holiday passengers—the gents full of high spirits and bottled beer and the ladies eating pork pies, the children sticky with peppermint rock.” When the ferry steamer Gracie Fields was sunk, Priestley gave it a Viking funeral. “But now—look—this little steamer, like all her brave and battered sisters, is immortal. She’ll go sailing proudly down the years in the epic of Dunkirk. And our great-grandchildren, when they learn how we began the war by snatching glory out of defeat, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion into hell and came back glorious.” The RAF would enter the ventricle of national memory during the Battle of Britain later in the summer, but in the final days of May few of the men on the beaches had a good word to say about the airmen. Boarding a destroyer in Dunkirk Harbor, Alan Deere, a Spitfire pilot shot down outside Dunkirk, was stopped by an army major who told him, “For all the good you chaps seem to be doing, you might as well stay on the ground.” When Deere finally did get aboard a ship, “he was greeted in stony silence by a crowd of . . . army officers. ‘Why so friendly?’ he asked. ‘What have the RAF done?’ ‘That’s just it,’ said one of the officers. ‘What have they done?’ ”
When the afternoon war cabinet convened a little after five o’clock on the thirtieth, the ministers received a rare piece of good news: according to the latest War Office estimates, thus far 105,000 men had been taken off the beaches; the Admiralty estimate, 101,000, though slightly lower, was still well above the original estimate of 40,000 to 50,000 men. The other topics on the cabinet agenda that afternoon included a report that the senior French officers in Dunkirk still “had received no orders at all about evacuation,” that Count Ciano had called in the British ambassador to discuss the evacuation of British nationals from Italy, and that Reynaud wanted to make yet another approach to Mussolini.
Air Chief Newall’s warning of a large-scale German airborne and seaborne raid on Britain prompted a discussion of the invasion threat. Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, said the recent intelligence pointed to a heightening of the threat. German activity along the Norwegian coast had increased notably, and the Kriegsmarine was collecting motorboats in Hamburg, Bremen, and other German port towns.
When Pound said the Germans had also left one line of approach to the coast open when they mined the coastal waters of southern England, Churchill became agitated: “We should not hesitate to contaminate our beaches with gas if this course was to our advantage. . . . We have the right to do what we want with our territory.”
Pound sounded less than enthusiastic about Churchill’s proposal. If the Kriegsmarine made a determined night attack, some vessels would probably get through, he said.
Toward the end of a discussion on the new French appeals for troops and aircraft, for “concessions to Italy,” and for an Anglo-French approach to President Roosevelt, Churchill said that “when we refuse these requests, the French would use these refusals as an excuse for giving up the struggle.” Then he announced that he would fly to Paris the next day to speak to Reynaud.
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The next morning, when the prime minister’s 10:00 a.m. arrival time came and went with no sign of his plane, the dignitaries on the tarmac at Villacoublay Aerodrome began whispering to one another. An indeterminate number of minutes passed; the whispers grew louder, the speculations more ominous; then a particularly “keen-eyed” dignitary pointed to the sky; almost immediately other hands were pointing upward. Against the gray cloud bank over Paris, the tiny silver speck to the north of the aerodrome was easy to pick out. A few minutes later, a smiling Churchill was poking a playful finger into Spears’s belly. The other members of the British party included Attlee, who, in a display of proletarian solidarity, had left his new black homburg hat uncreased; the CIGS, John Dill, a tall, slim man with an elegant manner and a distant air that made him seem never entirely present; and Pug Ismay, Churchill’s military adviser and a man of steadiness, good temper, and good sense.
Arriving at the French Ministry of War on the rue Saint-Dominique a little before 2:00 p.m., the British party was ushered into a large, sunlit conference room on the first floor. An immense baize-covered conference table dominated the room, which looked out on a lovely garden in the courtyard. The French delegates, who had arrived a few minutes earlier, had commandeered the side of the table with garden views, leaving the British guests with nothing to look at but their French opposite numbers across the table. They did not look very welcoming. Across from Churchill sat a sulking Reynaud; across from Dill sat Weygand, wearing an enormous pair of riding boots that gave him a certain resemblance to an aging Puss ’n’ Boots. Pétain, who “look[ed] particularly somber,” was sitting off by himself, having no opposite number. The marshal fascinated Spears. He never displayed any signs of “broken morale” that Spears could detect. He “had none of Weygand’s ups and downs, no wild alterations between ‘We will manage somehow’ and ‘All is lost.’ ” Pétain was detached but not in the way Dill was. His remoteness seemed to say: “I, Philippe Pétain, hero of Verdun, bear no personal responsibility for the sordid mess the current war has become. My war was the Great War; I had been one of the architects of the glorious victory France had won in 1918.” As far as Spears could tell, Pétain viewed the current war as “a rather tiresome . . . almost boring drama taking place in a distant branch of the family from which his attention could not be entirely withheld.” The only Frenchman in the room whose resolve Spears fully trusted was Georges Mandel, but Mandel was a Jew, and in the France of the Third Republic it was best to keep that kind of thing to oneself.
Churchill opened the thirteenth meeting of the Supreme War Council with an announcement: As of noon that day, May 31, 165,000 men had been evacuated from Dunkirk, including 10,000 wounded.
“How many French?” Weygand asked.
“So far only fifteen thousand.”
“The French are being left behind?” Weygand’s voice was “querulous and aggressive.” Spears looked over at Churchill, expecting one of those Churchillian “sentences that hit like a blow.” To his surprise, “the light had died out of [the prime minister’s] face. It was evident that he [believed] every indulgence must be shown to people so highly tried, undergoing so fearful an ordeal.” “We are companions in misfortune,” Churchill told the French delegates. “There is nothing to be gained from recrimination over our common miseries.” The stillness that followed this observation was “something different from silence,” Spears recalled. “It was like the hush that falls on men at the opening of a great national pageant.”
Weygand’s question had disrupted the conference schedule. Three subjects were to be discussed that afternoon, and Dunkirk was the second. The first, Narvik, now seemed as remote as the Punic Wars. Having finally captured the town a few days earlier, the members of the Supreme War Council concluded that the British brigade and the fifteen to sixteen thousand French and Polish troops occupying Narvik, and the hundred antiaircraft guns they had brought with them, could more profitably be employed on the Somme–Aisne line or defending the beaches of southeastern England against invasion.
After the council agreed to evacuate Narvik on June 2, the discussion returned to Dunkirk and the British and French evacuation numbers. Churchill said the principal reason for the large disparity in the figures was that, “up to the present, the French troops [in Dunkirk] had received no orders to evacuate.” Here Weygand interrupted to say that an evacuation order had been issued to General Blanchard, who had possessed no such order when he spoke to Gort on May 29. The conversation wandered off in other directions for a few minutes; then Reynaud brought it back to the evacuation numbers. His voice was pleasant, calm, and even, but his words were not. “Out of two hundred and twenty thousand British troops, a hundred and fifty thousand had been evacuated,” he said, “whereas out of two hundred thousand Frenchmen, only fifteen thousand had been taken off. This was bound to evoke extreme and possibly dangerous repercussions in [French] public opinion, should it become known.”
After noting that he was anxious that France be left with no further grounds for complaint, Churchill said, “Today, May 31, had been designated French day [at Dunkirk]; the French had absolute priority over the British.” Spears noticed that Churchill’s jaw thrust forward noticeably when he said the British rear guard at Dunkirk would “fight to the water edge, even though they may be assommé” (“wiped out”).
Pétain’s ancient face, pockmarked with brown age spots, remained expressionless during Churchill’s speech.
Reynaud said he hoped that upon completion of the Dunkirk operation, the full strength of the RAF and the BEF would be transferred to the Somme–Aisne line to help defend Paris. This would not imperil Britain, as “the Germans would [not] attack Great Britain until the French had been liquidated.”
The BEF would have to be rebuilt first, Churchill replied. “Our army will have lost everything but its rifles. We shall have lost a thousand [artillery] guns, which is extremely serious; there are not more than five hundred guns in England today. [And] we have lost thousands of lorries. Should a small German force, well equipped with artillery, land in England, it could not be opposed by a force of equivalent strength. In such a case, the civil population would fight with . . . unconquerable resolve.” Then, overwhelmed by the image of old men and prepubescent girls with hundred-year-old rifles making desperate last stands in schools, fields, and factories, Churchill said:
It must be realized if Germany defeated either Ally or both, she would give no quarter. They would be reduced to the status of vassals and slaves for ever. It would be far better that the civilization of Western Europe, with all its achievements, should come to a tragic but splendid end than that the two great Democracies should linger on stripped of all that made life worth living.
Spears glanced over at Pétain. The marshal looked “personally insulted.” He finds Churchill’s rhetoric offensive, Spears thought.
The meeting concluded with a brief discussion of Italy, the third subject on the council agenda. Believing its entry into the war imminent, Churchill proposed that the moment Rome issued a declaration of war, air strikes be launched against its major industrial cities: Turin, Genoa, and Milan. After the meet
ing adjourned, several of the council principals, including Pétain and Churchill, gathered in front of a bay window near the far end of the conference room. Despite all the setbacks France had endured, Churchill had never given up hope that it would eventually find its man of destiny—its Clemenceau, its Napoleon. Now, watching Pétain, “detached and somber,” standing at the bay window, his bent frame silhouetted by the afternoon sun, Churchill realized that France had already found its man of destiny and it was his intention to deliver it a separate peace at the earliest opportunity.
In Britain, Mass Observation’s morale index, which had stood at 2.17 on May 29, indicating public optimism, fell to 0.76 on the thirty-first, indicating deep public pessimism. Whatever Churchill might tell the French, the Americans, and the world about British resolve, the reality was, a sizable portion of the British public was distraught and frightened.
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I. The 145th Brigade received a withdrawal order on the morning of the twenty-ninth.
II. While the Lloyd George memorandum overstated the consequences, the damage the war did to Britain’s postwar position was still significant. Gas rationing did not end until 1950, food rationing until 1954. Britain lost many of its markets and commercial airline routes to the United States, and the British economy, racked by periodic crises in the early decades of the postwar period, did not regain its equilibrium until the early 1980s. The British historians who argue that the war turned Britain into a “vassal state” of the United States exaggerate, but, as Lloyd George and many other critics of the war foresaw, it did cost Britain its position among the first rank of nations.