by John Kelly
“Under no circumstances will Great Britain waste time in reproaches and recriminations,” Churchill said. “But that is a very different matter from becoming a party to a peace made in contravention of an agreement so recently concluded.” Then he reiterated the threat that Spears had made to Pétain a few days earlier. “We are fast approaching a universal blockade, a blockade of Europe, which will become increasingly effective. . . . France, if she is occupied by the Germans, cannot hope to be spared.” Churchill wandered off in another direction for a moment or two, then made another threat. “If we fight on with success, if we can see the winter through, the struggle will then develop with full fury. France cannot hope to elude the consequence of the duel. As a result, there may well develop a bitter antagonism between the British and French people. There will, in fact, be many questions to be considered if the president’s reply is of a negative character.”
Reynaud’s voice had also acquired an undertone of menace. “If France continued to suffer without England’s making a gesture, recognizing what we have endured, I should be very preoccupied for the future. This might result in a new and very grave situation in Europe.” There were several more minutes of back and forth in this vein; then the British delegation requested a time-out.
After a consultation in the courtyard of the prefecture, Churchill returned to the meeting room and announced that the British government would not reply to the French request to void the no-separate-peace pledge until President Roosevelt had replied to Reynaud. After the meeting Churchill walked out to the corridor of the prefecture and saw de Gaulle “standing solid and expressionless in a doorway.” “L’homme du destin” (man of destiny) he whispered as he passed by. De Gaulle “remained impassive.”
During the meeting, the courtyard abutting the prefecture had filled with notables, including the son of Georges Clemenceau, who was shaking the prime minister’s hand when a female voice shouted, “Mr. Churchill!” Hélène de Portes was standing in the courtyard. “My country is bleeding to death! I have a story to tell you!” Pretending not to hear, Churchill got into his car. Cries of “You must hear me! You must hear me!” followed the prime minister out of the courtyard.
* * *
The next day, June 14, Roosevelt’s reply to Reynaud’s June 10 appeal for assistance produced an embarrassing incident. Though encouraging, the president’s response was not the virtual declaration of war that some British officials, including Churchill, took it to be. A British request to publish the reply was flatly denied. June 15 and 16 were dominated by discussions of a proposal to form the Franco-British Union. Mercifully, the scheme, which originated with a French official, René Pleven, and would have made the two nations one, died an unmourned death. On June 16, Marshal Pétain replaced Reynaud as premier. And on June 17, German fighters sunk the British troop ship Lancastria while it was evacuating BEF units south of the pocket; five thousand of the six thousand passengers were killed in the attack. A few hours later, Marshal Pétain announced that he had “applied to our adversary to ask if he is prepared to seek with me, soldier to soldier, after the battle, honorably, the means whereby hostilities may cease.”
The following day, June 18, William Shirer stood in the place de la Concorde, listening to a loudspeaker announce the French surrender. Shirer had been in Paris for almost forty-eight hours, and this was the first time he had encountered French men and women in any appreciable numbers. Driving into the city the previous day, he had half expected to be greeted by the Paris that had greeted him on half a dozen other June afternoons—the Paris Oscar Hammerstein II wrote about not long after the French surrender:
The last time I saw Paris
Her trees were dressed for spring
And lovers walked beneath those trees
And birds found songs to sing
I dodged the same old taxicabs
That I had dodged for years
The chorus of their squeeky horns
Was music to my ears.
Instead, Shirer found himself in a German city. Above the Chamber of Deputies flew a “giant” swastika flag; in front of the Ministry of Marine stood a Mark IV Panzer tank. And in the Hôtel Crillon, Woodrow Wilson’s residence during the Paris Peace Conference in 1918, German generals spangled with gold braids toasted the Führer and one another. On a walk that morning, Shirer had seen only German Army cars and motorcycles on the streets, and only young German soldiers in the cafés. Where was the “Paris of gay lights, the laughter, the music, the women in the streets? . . . And what was this?” Shirer wondered.
* * *
In London that afternoon, Churchill addressed the French surrender in a speech to the House of Commons.
I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us, but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it, like the brave men of Barcelona [a reference to the Republican Army’s defense of the city in the Spanish Civil War], and will be able to stand up to it, and carry on in spite of it, at least as well as any other people in the world. Much will depend upon this, and every man and every woman will have the chance to show the finest qualities of their race and render the highest service to their cause. For all of us at this time, whatever our sphere, our station, our occupation, our duties, it will be a help to remember the famous lines, “He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene.”
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon it depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into the broad sunlit uplands; but if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, and all we have known and care for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years men will still say, This was their finest hour.
Three days later, on June 21, Shirer drove up to Compiègne, a town north of Paris, to witness the formal French surrender. The ceremony was even more humiliating than Weygand had feared. The German and French delegates met in the Forest of Compiègne, where Germany had surrendered in 1918, and in the same wagon-lit (railroad sleeping car) where Marshal Foch, the Allied supreme commander, had dictated the Allied terms to the representatives of Imperial Germany. Shirer was standing just outside the wagon-lit when the German delegation entered. He noticed that Hitler took the seat Foch had sat in in 1918. After the ceremony, Shirer and a few other reporters followed Hitler and his party to a granite memorial several hundred feet from the wagon-lit. Hitler stopped in front of it and read the inscription.
HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE . . . VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE.
Shirer, who was standing some distance away, took out the binoculars he had brought along and scanned Hitler’s face. “It [was] afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.” After reading the inscription, Hitler began to walk away, then abruptly turned and “glanced back at it: contemptuous, angry. . . . You [could] grasp the depth of his hatred,” Shirer wrote later. “But there [was] triumph there, too—revengeful, triumphant hate. Then Hitler “snapped his hands on his hips, arched his shoulders, parted his feet wide apart.” Even at a distance of fifty yards, it struck Shirer as “a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place and all that it had stood for.”
* * *
I. Gort’s evacuation was ordered by Churchill, who did not want to give the Germans a propaganda victory by capturing or killing the leader of the BEF.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY
Tomorrow, just you wait and see. There’ll be love and laughter and peace ever after.
—“The White Cliffs of Dover”
On the afternoon of June 17—a sullen, overcast Monday—two men stood in front of Hanlon’s, a clothing store in Bolton, a hard-luck Midlands textile town that had ridden the industrial revolution up to prosperity in the nineteenth century and was now riding it down to penury in the twentieth. Pétain’s armistice announcement had come through on the wireless around 1:00 p.m.; it was now a little after three, long enough for the initial shock to wear off. “What can we do?” asked the younger man, an observer from Mass Observation. The older man, the proprietor of Hanlon’s, said he had no idea. “We can’t stand up to the Italian and French navies combined, that’s for sure.” The proprietor paused, then added, “You know, I had a fellow in here yesterday and he bought a pair of flannels. [When] I remarked that they were an expensive pair, he told me, ‘Oh well, I’ll be in a free khaki pair soon, probably. But I’ll have these in case I ever come back.’ In case I ever come back.” The proprietor repeated the words as if he could not quite believe them.
“We chose the wrong age to live in,” the observer said.
The proprietor shrugged. “I guess there’s nothing we can do about it.” Then he went back inside the store.
For the generation of Britons who had come of age during the Great War and thought of the French Army as the greatest military in the world, the fall of France, though unsurprising, still came as a tremendous shock. “From the moment you woke up,” said Donald Johnson, an army doctor, “you thought, ‘Oh, my God’ as you realized [Britain’s] position afresh . . . It was only after two or three beers at lunch that the situation did not seem quite as bad; but by three thirty in the afternoon it was desperate again—and it was quite time to go back to the mess for another drink. In the evening, the outlook depended entirely on the amount of alcohol you consumed. I use the plural ‘you’ because everyone was in the same boat.” The German bombing raids, which from June 18 became an almost nightly occurrence, put a further strain on morale. In a Midlands chemist’s shop, a young woman was overheard debating whether to get a permanent or get drunk with her friend. After some back-and-forth, the young woman said, “It doesn’t encourage you to spend good money on a permanent when you think your head might be blown off tomorrow.”
After studying the impact of the French news on civilian morale, the Home Intelligence Committee concluded that, at present, there was a “dogged determination to see the thing through,” but warned that, as one inconclusive battle followed another, there was a real possibility the public would grow weary of the struggle and begin agitating for an end to the war. There is, said the Committee, “a feeling not widely expressed but of considerable importance, that a negotiated peace with Germany would be preferable to a prolongation of the war.”
Churchill was aware of this strain of thought, and, in the days following the French surrender, attempted to counteract it in two speeches that laid out a credible British path to survival and, eventually, victory. The first, the “Finest Hour” speech, was directed at the general public and received a mixed reception. Churchill’s words had a “settling” effect on morale, Mass Observation reported the day after the speech, but noted that the effect was “somewhat counteracted by his delivery.” Some listeners thought Churchill sounded “drunk”; others, insincere—that “he did not himself feel the confidence he was proclaiming.”
The second speech was delivered at a secret session of Parliament on June 21, and its target was the British political class. No copy of the speech survives, but, from Churchill’s notes, it is possible to reconstruct his main points. He began with a subject on everyone’s mind that afternoon: the “impending” German bombing campaign. Thus far, he said, the Luftwaffe attacks had amounted to little more than nuisance raids, but that was about to change. In the months ahead, the country should prepare for:
Steady continuous bombing
Probably rising to great intensity occasionally,
Must be regular condition of life.
How should civilians respond to the bombing? Churchill’s answer was brutally frank:
Learn to get used to it.
Eels get used to skinning.
Then, expanding on the point, he said, “The bombing would be a test of our nerves against theirs.”
No one can tell the result.
The supreme battle depends upon
the courage of the ordinary man and woman.
Next, Churchill addressed the invasion threat: “Everything depends on attack[ing] the landed enemy at once.” We must “leap at his throat and keep the grip until the life runs out of him.”
If Hitler fails to invade
or destroy Britain,
He has lost the war . . .
Then Churchill reiterated a point he had made several times during the war cabinet debates:
If get through next three months
get through next three years . . .
But all depends on winning this battle
Here in Britain, now this summer.
As for the United States, he told the House, “nothing will stir them like fighting in England,” which was true. But the suggestion of American assistance in the remark was not. Earlier in the day Churchill had asked his military aide, “Pug” Ismay, for a list of the American aircraft and munitions “which have actually arrived in the country.” Ismay told him that nothing had arrived: “Nil.” In the secret session speech, “nil” somehow became an American promise of the “fullest aid.” Washington did send 250,000 rifles, 130 million rounds of ammunition, and 80,000 machine guns in early June, though not much else since. In a June 27 cable, Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, warned London that “a wave of pessimism [is] passing over this country to the effect that Great Britain now must inevitably be defeated, and that there is no use in the United States doing anything more to help it. . . . There is some evidence [that the pessimism] is beginning to affect the president.” That may have been an understatement. Besides Roosevelt’s obvious reasons for withholding assistance—Britain was probably going to lose anyway; the United States needed what weapons it had to defend itself; and concern about undermining his chances of winning an unprecedented third term—the president had other, less publicized reasons for stepping away from Britain. Through Joe Kennedy, he had learned of the secret war cabinet discussions about a compromise peace, which raised the possibility that any future American aid could end up in a German armory. And, through an unnamed but “good” authority, Roosevelt had been told that Hitler was considering a compromise peace that would allow Britain to remain independent if it agreed to surrender the British fleet and large parts of the empire. This raised an even more ghastly prospect than Kennedy’s news: a US Navy confronted by a German-dominated Royal Navy operating from former British territories such as Bermuda.
Independent of Roosevelt, other powerful forces in American life were also working against British interests that summer. On June 22, the day of the official French surrender in the Forest of Compiègne, George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, and Admiral Harold Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, pressed Roosevelt to ban virtually all future arms sales to Britain. The president refused, but plans to sell London twelve B-17s, the US Army Air Corp’s new heavy bomber, were abandoned. German documents captured after the Second World War highlighted another, more insidious threat to the Anglo-American relationship. A few weeks before the Republican Convention in the summer of 1940, Hans Thomsen, the German chargé d’affaires in Washington, requested funds from Berlin to finance the visit of fifty Republican congressmen to the convention “so that they may work on the delegates in the Republican Party in favor of an isolationist foreign policy.” Thomsen, a seasoned diplomat, knew enough not to name names in a cable, but he did say the fifty guests would be invited by a well-known congressman whom Thomsen said was work
ing with the German embassy in Washington. What is known for certain about this incident is that Hamilton Fish—a prominent New York congressman, bitter opponent of Roosevelt, and leading light of the isolationist movement—did invite fifty of his congressional colleagues to the 1940 convention, and that the congressman did testify before the party’s platform committee. Still, if Fish was complicit in a Nazi plot (the fifty congressmen almost certainly were not) he did not have much success. Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940, was an internationalist whose views on the war were far closer to Franklin Roosevelt’s than to Hamilton Fish’s.
During the secret session speech, Churchill made one other point about Anglo-American relations. He said that the most effective way to secure America’s help and trust was through bold actions. Britain had to show that it was determined to see the thing through to the end, no matter how far away the end might be or how brutal the passage to it. This was not a new point. In one form or another, Churchill had made it several times since mid-May, but events on the fields of Flanders and northern France had not provided any opportunities for displays of British boldness. The French surrender would.