Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  A British sergeant named George Starr, who escaped from the Continent through Dunkirk, belatedly reached home in Yorkshire on 18 June. He found his father listening to the radio announcement of France’s surrender. The Starr family had for many years run a travelling circus on the Continent. George’s father switched off the set, shook his head and said: ‘The French will never forgive us for this.’ His son could not understand what he meant. Later in the war, however, George Starr spent three years as a British agent with the French Resistance. He enjoyed ample opportunity to explore the sense of betrayal harboured by many French people towards Britain, which never entirely faded.

  De Gaulle, Reynaud’s army minister, almost alone among prominent Frenchmen chose to pitch camp in London, and secured the evacuation of his wife. The war cabinet opposed his request that he should be permitted to broadcast to his people on the BBC. Churchill however, urged on by Spears, insisted that the renegade – for so De Gaulle was perceived by many of his own people – should be given access to a microphone. The general’s legal adviser, Professor Cassin, enquired of his new chief what was the status of his embryo movement in Britain. De Gaulle answered magnificently: ‘We are France!…The defeated are those who accept defeat.’ The general had an answer, too, to the problem of establishing his own stature: ‘Churchill will launch me like a new brand of soap.’ The British government indeed hired an advertising agency, Richmond Temple, to promote Free France. De Gaulle would need all the help he could get. Few Frenchmen, even those evacuated to Britain from the battlefield, were willing to fight on if their government quit. De Gaulle asked the captain of the French destroyer Milan, which carried him across the Channel, if he would serve under British colours. The naval officer answered that he would not. Most of his compatriots proved like-minded. ‘Mr Churchill finds that there are not enough French and German bodies to satisfy him,’ declared a sulphurous front-page editorial in the Paris paper Le Matin, in one of its first issues after the surrender. ‘We ask if the British prime minister has lost his head. If so, what a pity that our ministers did not perceive it sooner.’ The paper went on to denounce De Gaulle, and to accuse the British of fomenting revolt in France’s overseas empire.

  In 1941 and 1942, the prime minister would be obliged to preside over many British defeats, and indeed humiliations. Yet no trauma was as profound, no shock as far-reaching, as that which befell him in his first weeks of office, when the German army destroyed France as a military power, and swept the British from the Continent. Henceforward, the character of the war thus became fundamentally different from that of 1914–18. All assumptions were set at naught upon which Allied war policy, and Churchill’s personal defiance of Hitler, had been founded. Whatever Britain’s continuing capabilities at sea and in the air, since September 1939 it had been taken for granted that the British Army would confront the Nazi legions alongside the French, in the frankly subordinate role demanded by its inferiority of numbers – just nine divisions to ninety-four French on the western front. The British Army could never alone aspire to dispute a battlefield with the Wehrmacht, and this knowledge dominated British strategy.

  It was hard for many people, even the highest in the land, to absorb the scale of the disaster which had befallen Allied arms, and which now threatened to overwhelm Britain. Alan Brooke was struck by a Churchillian observation about human nature. The prime minister said that the receptive capacity of a man’s mind was like a three-inch pipe running under a culvert. ‘When a flood comes the water flows over the culvert whilst the pipe goes on handling its 3 inches. Similarly the human brain will register emotions up to its “3 inch limit” and subsequent additional emotions flow past unregistered.’ So it now seemed to Brooke himself, and to a host of others. They perceived that a catastrophe was unfolding, but their hearts could not keep pace with the signals from their brains about its significance. Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary on 15 June: ‘My reason tells me that it will now be almost impossible to beat the Germans, and that the probability is that France will surrender and that we shall be bombed and invaded…Yet these probabilities do not fill me with despair. I seem to be impervious both to pleasure and pain. For the moment we are all anaesthetised.’

  Another eye-witness, writer Peter Fleming, then serving as an army staff officer, identified the same emotional confusion: ‘This period was one of carefree improvisation as far as most civilians were concerned. It was as though the whole country had been invited to a fancy-dress ball and everybody was asking everybody else “What are you going as?” A latent incredulity, and the fact that almost everybody had more than enough to do already, combined to give problems connected with invasion the status of engrossing digressions from the main business of life…The British, when their ally was pole-axed on their doorstep, became both gayer and more serene than they had been at any time since the overture to Munich struck up in 1937.’

  British casualties in France were large in relation to the size of the BEF, but trifling by comparison with those of the French, and with the infinitely more intense struggles that would take place later in the war. The army lost just 11,000 killed and missing, against 120,000 French dead. In addition, 14,070 British wounded were evacuated, and 41,030 BEF prisoners fell into German hands. The loss of tanks, artillery and weapons of all kinds was, of course, calamitous. It is a familiar and ill-founded cliché that the 1940 British Expeditionary Force was ill-equipped. In reality it was much better supplied with vehicles than the Germans, and had good tanks if these had been imaginatively employed. When Hitler’s Field Marshal Fedor von Bock saw the wreckage at Dunkirk, he wrote in astonishment: ‘Here lies the material of a whole army, so incredibly well-equipped that we poor devils can only look on with envy and amazement.’ The BEF was driven from Dunkirk after relatively light fighting and very heavy retreating, because it lacked mass to change the outcome of the campaign once the French front was broken, and was outfought by German formations with better leadership, motivation and air support. The British Army was now, for all practical purposes, disarmed. Almost a thousand RAF aircraft were gone, half of these fighters.

  But Britain had human material to forge a new army – though not one that alone could ever be large enough to face the Germans in a Continental war – if only time was granted before it must fight again. An American correspondent reported home that Londoners received news of the French surrender in grim silence rather than with jokes or protestations of defiance. The Battle of France was over, Churchill told the British people on the following night. The Battle of Britain was about to begin. The position of Churchill’s nation on 17 June was scarcely enviable. But it was vastly better than had seemed possible a month earlier, when the BEF faced annihilation.

  * * *

  * Estimates that as many as 8,000 people perished on the Lancastria are rendered implausible by the overall casualty figures for the campaign in France, which show a total British loss of life of only 11,000.

  THREE

  Invasion Fever

  In the months after September 1939, Britain found itself in the bleak – indeed, in some eyes absurd – position of having declared war on Germany, while lacking means to undertake any substantial military initiative, least of all to save Poland. The passivity of the ‘Phoney War’ ate deeply into the morale of the British people. By contrast, the events of May and June 1940 at least had the merit, brilliantly exploited by Churchill, that they thrust before the nation a clear and readily comprehended purpose: to defend itself against assault by an overwhelmingly powerful foe. The Royal Irish Fusiliers, back from Dunkirk, staged a mess party to celebrate news that the French had surrendered. ‘Thank heavens they have,’ said an officer gaily. ‘Now at last we can get on with the war.’ A middle-aged court shorthand writer named George King, living in Surrey, wrote in a diary letter intended for his gunner son, left behind in France and on his way to captivity in Germany: ‘Winston Churchill has told us just exactly where we stand. We are on our own, and have got to see this thing through;
and we can do it, properly led. Goodness knows what the swines will try, but somehow we’ve got to stick it.’

  Naval officer Robert Hichens wrote on 17 June: ‘Now we know that we have got to look to ourselves only, I have an idea that England will respond wonderfully to this setback. She is always greatest in taking reverses.’ After Churchill addressed the Commons on the 18th, a Labour backbencher, Dr Hastings Lees-Smith of Keighley, stood up: ‘My hon. friends on these benches have asked me on their behalf to say one or two sentences. They wish to say to the PM that in their experience among the broad masses of the people of this country never in their lives has the country been more united than it is today in its support of the PM’s assertion that we shall carry on right to the end. One sentence can summarise what we feel. Whatever the country is asked for in the months and, if necessary, in the years to come, the PM may be confident that the people will rise to their responsibilities.’

  Yet, if the grit displayed by King, Hichens and Lees-Smith was real enough, it would be mistaken to suppose that it was universal. Not all sceptics about Britain’s chances of survival were elderly politicians or businessmen. An RAF Hurricane pilot, Paul Mayhew, wrote in a family newsletter: ‘Now I suppose it’s our turn and though my morale is now pretty good…I can’t believe that there’s much hope for us, at any rate in Europe. Against a ferocious and relentless attack, the Channel’s not much of an obstacle and with the army presumably un-equipped, I don’t give much for our chances. Personally I have only two hopes; first that Churchill is more reliable than Reynaud and that we will go on fighting if England is conquered, and secondly that Russia, in spite of our blunders, will now be sufficiently scared to stage a distraction in the East. In America I have little faith; I suppose in God’s own time God’s own country will fight. But at present their army is smaller than the Swiss, their Air Force is puny and rather “playboy”, and I doubt whether we need their Navy.’ A week later, Mayhew apologised to his family for being ‘ludicrously defeatist’. But here was a young airman voicing fears widely shared among his elders.

  The summer and autumn of 1940 were poor seasons for truthtelling in Britain. That is to say, it was hard for even good, brave and honourable men to know whether they better served their country by voicing their private thoughts, allowing their brains to function, or by keeping silent. Logic decreed that Britain had not the smallest chance of winning the war in the absence of American participation, which remained implausible. Churchill knew this as well as anyone. Yet he and his supporters believed that the cause of freedom, the defiance of tyranny, made it essential that the British people should fight on regardless, sweeping aside all calculations of relative strengths and strategic disabilities. Posterity has heaped admiration upon the grandeur of this commitment. Yet at the time it demanded from intelligent men and women a suspension of reason which some rejected. For instance, Captain Ralph Edwards, director of naval operations at the Admiralty, was an almost unwavering sceptic. On 17 June he noted in his diary: ‘[Captain] Bill Tennant came in to say that he’d told Sir Walter Monckton of all our misgivings about the higher direction of the war.’ And again on the 23rd: ‘Our cabinet with that idiot Winston in charge changes its mind every 24 hours…I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that we’re so inept we don’t deserve to win & indeed are almost certain to be defeated. We never do anything right.’ Through the lonely eighteen months ahead, Churchill was galled that such scourges as Aneurin Bevan MP taxed him in the Commons with unwelcome facts of which he was thoroughly aware, painful realities such as he confronted every hour. From the outset, while he always insisted that victory would come, his personal prestige rested upon the honesty with which he acknowledged to the British people the gravity of the ordeal they faced.

  Churchill told MPs on 4 June: ‘Our thankfulness at the escape of our Army and so many men, whose loved ones have passed through an agonising week, must not blind us to the fact that what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster. I have myself full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government.’ After the prime minister sat down, as always exchanges between MPs degenerated into commonplaces. Dr Lees-Smith delivered words of appreciation. Glaswegian maverick Jimmy Maxton, an Independent Labour MP, raised a point of order, which led to cross words and pettiness. Captain Bellenger of Bassetlaw rebuked Mr Thorne of Plaistow, whom Bellenger believed had impugned his courage: ‘You have no right to make remarks of that kind.’

  Clausewitz wrote in 1811: ‘A government must never assume that its country’s fate, its whole existence, hangs on the outcome of a single battle, no matter how decisive.’ Churchill’s conduct after the fall of France exasperated some sceptics who perceived themselves as clear thinkers, but conformed perfectly to the Prussian’s dictum. His supreme achievement in 1940 was to mobilise Britain’s warriors, to shame into silence its doubters, to stir the passions of the nation, so that for a season the British people faced the world united and exalted. The ‘Dunkirk spirit’ was not spontaneous. It was created by the rhetoric and bearing of one man, displaying powers that will define political leadership for the rest of time. Under a different prime minister, the British people in their shock and bewilderment could as readily have been led in another direction. Nor was the mood long-lived. It persisted only until winter, when it was replaced by a more dogged, doubtful and less exuberant national spirit. But that first period was decisive: ‘If we can get through the next three months, we can get through the next three years,’ Churchill told the Commons on 20 June.

  Kingsley Martin argued in that week’s New Statesman that Churchill’s 18 June ‘finest hour’ broadcast to the nation was too simplistic: ‘He misunderstood [the British people’s] feelings when he talked of this as the finest moment of their history. Our feelings are more complex than that. To talk to common people in or out of uniform is to discover that determination to defend this island is coupled with a deep and almost universal bitterness that we have been reduced to such a pass.’ Yet the prime minister judged the predominant mood much more shrewdly than the veteran socialist. In 1938 the British had not been what Churchill wanted them to be. In 1941 and thereafter they would often disappoint his hopes. But in 1940, to an extraordinary degree he was able to shape and elevate the nation to fulfil his aspirations.

  Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in the New Yorker of 29 June:

  It would be difficult for an impartial observer to decide today whether the British are the bravest or merely the most stupid people in the world. The way they are acting in the present situation could be used to support either claim. The individual Englishman seems to be singularly unimpressed by the fact that there is now nothing between him and the undivided attention of a war machine such as the world has never seen before. Possibly it’s lack of imagination; possibly again it’s the same species of dogged resolution which occasionally produces an epic like Dunkirk. Millions of British families, sitting at their wellstocked breakfast tables eating excellent British eggs and bacon, can still talk calmly of the horrors across the Channel, perhaps without fully comprehending even now that anything like that could ever happen in England’s green and pleasant land.

  Many Americans, by contrast, thought it unlikely that Britain would survive. In New York, ‘one thing that strikes me is the amount of defeatist talk’, wrote US General Raymond Lee, ‘the almost pathological assumption that it is all over bar the shouting…that it is too late for the United States to do anything’. Key Pittman, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on Churchill to send the British fleet to the New World: ‘It is no secret that Great Britain is totally unprepared for defense and that nothing the US has to give can do more than delay the result…It is to be hoped that this plan
will not to be too delayed by futile encouragement to fight on. It is conclusively evident that Congress will not authorize intervention in the European war.’ Time magazine reported on 1 July: ‘So scared was many a US citizen last week that he wanted to shut off aid to Britain for fear that the US would weaken its own defenses, wanted to have the US wash its hands of help for Britain, for fear of getting involved on the losing side.’

  A Fortune opinion survey showed that even before France collapsed, most Americans believed that Germany would win the war. Only 30.3 per cent saw any hope for the Allies. A correspondent named Herbert Jones wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer which reflected widespread sentiment: ‘The great majority of Americans are not pacifists or isolationists, but, after the experience of the last war and Versailles, have no desire to pull Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire for her, under the slogan of “Save the World for Democracy”. They rightly feel that that little is to be gained by pouring out our money and the lives of our young men for the cause of either the oppressor of the Jews and Czechs or the oppressor of the Irish and of India…’ Richard E. Taylor of Apponaugh, Rhode Island, wrote to a friend in England urging him to draw the attention of the authorities to the danger that the Germans might tunnel under the Channel.

  Yet some Americans did not despair. An ‘aid to Britain’ committee gathered three million signatures on petitions to the White House. The organisation spawned a Historians’ Committee under Charles Seymour of Yale; a Scientists’ Committee under Nobel Prize-winner Harold Urey; a Theatre Committee under playwright and Roosevelt speechwriter Robert Sherwood. Americans were invited to set aside their caricature view of Britain as a nation of stuffed-shirt sleepyheads, and to perceive instead battling champions of freedom. Novelist Somerset Maugham, arriving in New York, predicted a vastly different post-war Britain, and hinted at the beginnings of one more sympathetic to an American social vision: ‘I have a feeling…that in the England of the future evening dress will be less important than it has been in the past.’ America was still far, far from belligerence, but forces favouring intervention were stirring.