Cabinet's Finest Hour

by Owen, David;

  Cartoon by David Low, Evening Standard, 14 May 1940

  Front row: Churchill, Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, and

  Amery; second row: Chamberlain, Greenwood, Halifax,

  Sinclair, Duff Cooper, A.V. Alexander, Eden

  1 Command of History (Penguin: 2005, p.169).

  1 Commandant (Major) Fauvelle, a Staff Officer from General Blanchard’s Group of Armies. Reynaud had written: ‘According to him there was no longer any hope of Blanchard being able to carry out the offensive movement that Weygand had ordered’ (In the Thick of the Fight, page 374, footnote 2).

  2 Lord Halifax.

  3 Neville Chamberlain.

  4 Dino Grandi, 1895–1988. Born at Mordano (Bologna). On active service, 1915–18. Foreign Minister, 1929–32. Italian Ambassador in London, 1932–9. Member of the Fascist Grand Council. Minister of Justice, Rome, 1939–43. On 24 July 1943 he moved the resolution in Fascist Grand Council which was the direct cause of the overthrow of Mussolini.

  5 Italo Balbo, 18896–1940. Minister of Aviation, 1936, and subsequently Governor of Libya. He opposed Italy’s alliance with Hitler and urged Mussolini not to enter the war in 1940.

  6 Neville Chamberlain and Clement Attlee.

  7 Arthur Greenwood, The Minister without Portfolio, evaluated in a memorandum for the War Cabinet that day, 26 May 1940 (War Cabinet Paper 171 of 1940 ‘British Strategy in the Near Future’), that Germany could be harmed by a ‘tight economic (Greenwood continued) blockade’ and her war effort thereby bolstered through co-operation with the United States. He wrote: ‘I suggest that immediate steps should be taken through diplomatic channels to press for active economic assistance and that a strong mission should be sent out to America without delay to secure economic and financial allies for the prosecution of the blockade with the utmost vigour’ (Cabinet papers 66/8).

  8 Anthony Eden.

  9 Attlee.

  10 Chamberlain.

  11 Halifax.

  12 The Menin Gate at Ypres had been rebuilt as a memorial to British war dead who had no grave.

  13 Chamberlain.

  1 Arthur Greenwood.

  14 The ambassador in Washington. In his telegram No. 814 from Washington, sent on 24 May 1940.

  15 Sir John Dill.

  16 See Document 1, page 135.

  17 Kingsley Wood. Conservative MP for Woolwich West, 1918–1943. Secretary of State for Air, 1938–40. Chancellor of the Exchequer from May 1940 until his death.

  18 Air Marshal Richard Peirse.

  19 Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall.

  20 Sir Archibald Sinclair.

  21 War Cabinet No. 170 of 1940. See Document.

  22 Words that could not be properly or fully deciphered were indicated this way in the War Cabinet’s minutes, with a bracket and a question mark.

  23 Sinclair.

  24 Halifax.

  25 Dill.

  26 Duff Cooper.

  1 This phrase had been suggested to Churchill by Lieutenant-Colonel G. M. O. Davy. Brought into the War Cabinet to give an account of the Belgian capitulation, he persuaded Churchill to ‘cut all references to treachery and the absence of warning’. After Churchill redrafted his statement, he eventually said ‘How about that, Colonel Davy?’ ‘That’s better, Sir,’ he replied, and everyone laughed. The PM smiled.

  1 Walter Turner Monckton, 1891–1965. Educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. Director General Ministry of Information, 1940–1; British Propaganda and Information Services, Cairo, 1941–2. Solicitor-General, 1945. Conservative MP for Bristol West, 1951–7. Minister of Labour and National Service, 1951–5. Minister of Defence, 1955–6. Paymaster-General, 1956–7. Created Viscount, 1957.

  1 Halifax.

  2 Robert Gilbert Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the Foreign Secretary, 1938–41.

  1 Neville Chamberlain.

  2 Arthur Greenwood.

  1 William Christian Bullitt, 1891–1967. Entered the State Department, 1917. President Wilson’s special emissary to Russia, 1919. United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1933–6; to France, 1936–41. President Roosevelt’s special representative in the Far East, 1941. Special Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1942–3. Served as a Major in the French armed forces, 1944.

  1 Giuseppe Bastianini.

  1 Pimlott writes in an editorial note that ‘Although there is an entry for virtually every day for much of the period of the Coalition, Dalton did not compose his diary daily. His usual practice was to dictate a week’s material at a single sitting.’ From internal evidence, this entry for 28 May was written at least two days later.

  2 Oswald Ernald Mosley, 1896–1980.

  3 Dalton later set down another version of Churchill’s words in the margin of this diary entry: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’

  4 Neville Chamberlain.

  1 ‘He told us he did not expect to get more than 50,000 away from Dunkirk’ (later holograph note).

  5

  Speaking for All of Us

  In trying to reconstruct the argumentation, wisdom and mistakes of May 1940, it is the questions over whether to negotiate or to fight that are central. Churchill, above all, could not live with surrendering what he believed was Britain’s greatest strength, namely the country’s readiness to fight. Weaken that new-found indomitable cross-party spirit, give the impression to Hitler that he, Churchill, was like the other leaders Hitler had conquered, and Britain would be finished. It could be tolerated that France would negotiate through Italy, and even for a non-combatant like the US President, but he, as Prime Minister, was not prepared to talk to Hitler through Italy or any other means. I do not believe his position on this ever shifted and, every bit as importantly, the same position was held by Attlee, Greenwood and Sinclair.

  The meetings of May 1940 were not to discuss a re-run of the Munich negotiations. Whatever view readers take of Munich, it was, in essence, an attempt to prevent a war from starting. Whether to negotiate with Italy was about a war that had already been running for eight months. Would negotiating stop that war or ensure defeat? There is a duty on any Foreign Secretary to look all the time for negotiation opportunities for peace and ensure that serious alternatives to war are examined, even if rejected. Neither Reynaud nor Halifax, with their different roles, were acting irresponsibly in examining the Mussolini option.

  The reader has, in Chapter 4, the chance to follow a continuous narrative of the nine meetings in three days, and to read alongside these all the key documents that were available to those Cabinet ministers at the time, uninterrupted by comment or information from me or others. The Minutes themselves are unusual: never before or since have Minutes so comprehensively covered a real political debate with such an animated account of the opinions of named individuals in so much detail, and recorded for posterity to examine. The Minutes provide a lesson about the strengths of collective responsibility in government, of the virtues of private discussion in Cabinet and of debate led by a Prime Minister who chooses only to reply on being ‘primus inter pares’.

  It is the best practical argument for maintaining and enhancing Cabinet government of considerable relevance to the UK in 2016 after the failed Presidential models practised in their different ways by the three previous Prime Ministers, Blair, Brown and Cameron. In the Chilcot Report on the Iraq War of 2003, published on 6 July 2016, the Imperial Prime Ministership has been tried and found wanting, and the incompatibility of an executive President, as in the US, with British parliamentary democracy exposed for all to see; 1940 is a salutary lesson of what has been proven to work at the most critical period in our country’s history, when we really did, from June 1940 to December 1941, stand alone. But the reader has to go beyond the inevitably inadequate wording to sense the nuances and the power play behind the varying approaches, shaped by background and experiences, of the five initial participants, six when joined on their fourth meeting by Sincl
air. Leader of the Liberal Party, Sinclair had served as Churchill’s second-in-command in France after Churchill took a leave of absence from Parliament in 1916 to fight on the Western Front for eighteen months, having been given the temporary British Army rank of lieutenant colonel to take command of the 6th Battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers. Sinclair was anti-appeasement and a friend.

  The coalition government was maintained up until the preparations for the 1945 election. Labour’s contribution was a massive one, something which has been distorted over time by an impression of Churchill standing alone. He was in truth very rarely alone, and certainly not during these nine meetings of May 1940. After the end of the war in 1945, by allowing Churchill and his researchers to have full access to all the documents, which has been accepted practice for senior Cabinet members writing about events, and to write as though there had never been any discussion of a negotiated peace was to perpetuate a distortion of the truth that only ended with the publication of documents under the 30-year rule. The distortive effect of this has been brilliantly analysed by David Reynolds in his book In Command of History.

  The crucial sentence on discussion of negotiated peace comes in the second confidential meeting of ministers when the French and M. Reynaud’s views on the sort of settlement that might keep Italy out of the war are delineated.

  {If an approach was made to Italy, what sort of terms would Italy ask? Probably the neutralisation of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, the demilitarisation of Malta, and the limitation of Naval forces in the Mediterranean. Some alteration in the status of Tunis would also be asked for, and the Dodecanese [the islands in the SE of Greece near to Turkey] would have to be put right.}

  At the third meeting Halifax favoured making an approach to Italy and thought

  {the last thing that Signor Mussolini wanted was to see Herr Hitler dominating Europe. He would be anxious, if he could, to persuade Herr Hitler to take a more reasonable attitude.}

  Churchill had already suggested Halifax should go over and see Reynaud who had flown in and was at Admiralty House but he

  {doubted whether anything would come of an approach to Italy, but said that the matter was one which the War Cabinet would have to consider}

  There is no question that every step Churchill took throughout these critical days was influenced by one overriding political factor: to ensure that the combined influence of Halifax and Chamberlain did not saddle him with a policy he could not live with. I do not believe that Churchill ever felt he could not handle Chamberlain or Halifax individually; it was their combination that he feared. He was not contemptuous of either and this is one of the reasons that, despite being highly hubristic, he never acquired what I have written about extensively and called Hubris Syndrome. He identified both men as potential obstacles to his plans and actions, to be moved when possible, but he was confident throughout that he could handle them. In handling them he flattered, cajoled, and maintained the illusion of potential shifts in his thinking, but without any real intention of shifting. All of these are legitimate techniques for influencing debate and discussion in a democracy and essential for any Prime Minister handling the egos around a Cabinet table. What anyone says in Cabinet is not always what they feel; you propose sometimes knowing you will lose, but in losing you hope or even expect to gain.

  I think it was deliberate flattery when Churchill wrote to Chamberlain on 10 May that “to a large extent I am in your own hands”, proudly quoted, as I am sure he knew it would be, by Chamberlain writing to his sisters (see Chapter 3, p. 80). Churchill used the same technique but to less effect on Halifax, who had shown he could be both a leader and an administrator as Viceroy of India, serving as Lord Irwin, as he was then called. Now Lord Halifax, he had chosen to return to the rough and tumble of British politics; having been appointed Viceroy whilst still young, he did not let the pomp and ceremony of India go to his head on his return and seemed to enjoy politics in the Lords as one well able to hold his own in political combat. Halifax was a schemer, but Churchill did not fear him nor did he believe Halifax capable of shaping events. In politics guts is everything, and when Churchill watched Halifax turn down Chamberlain’s offer of the premiership he must have thought the lesser of him. Ambition to be the top man was second nature to Churchill; influencing from below had no appeal. He did not become First Lord of the Admiralty under Chamberlain to influence him, but to be better placed to take over from him. Staying quiet, as he claimed he did, unnaturally but deliberately and on good advice, Halifax used the Lords as an excuse, though Chamberlain knew membership of the House of Lords was not, at that stage in British democracy, an insuperable barrier. It is impossible to imagine had Churchill been in the Lords that he would have turned down such an offer from Chamberlain.

  So Churchill using every political wile, skill and knowledge he had accumulated over the decades, was intent on one thing: prizing Chamberlain away from Halifax. As this book makes clear, I agree with much of Andrew Roberts’s writing, but not the chapter heading ‘Churchill as Micawber’ in The Holy Fox. John Lukacs, whose scholarship and skill in Five Days in London May 1940 I am hugely indebted to, specifically endorses this description, also mentioning Charles Dickens’s book David Copperfield, explaining Micawber’s hope that “something may turn up.” I see no suggestion that Churchill was waiting on events, rather I submit there is every evidence that he, within the limits of his and the UK’s powers, was shaping events tirelessly. Micawberism was never Churchill’s style nor his attitude. Optimism he certainly had in abundance. But Churchill exploited the fact that a Prime Minister controls the Agenda of the Cabinet and authorises not only whether any paper goes to Cabinet but determines when – a considerable power. The memorandum written by Arthur Greenwood on 26 May, War Cabinet Paper 171 of 1940 ‘British Strategy in the Near Future’, arguing for full economic cooperation with the United States, would not have been presented, let alone discussed that day, had not Churchill wanted it. Indeed, he may even have prompted Greenwood to write it. The memorandum was written quickly and personally by Greenwood as an economist and it was there on the agenda because it fitted in with Churchill’s urgent need to get the War Cabinet focused on help from Roosevelt as soon as possible with military equipment. At every stage during these nine meetings, unspoken or not, Churchill had in his mind how any event or decision would play out in Washington.

  Likewise, it was Churchill who had set the terms of the Chiefs of Staff’s most important paper to be discussed over the nine meetings, ‘British Strategy in the Near Future’, finished late on 26 May. It was taken next day by the War Cabinet, but its terms of reference came from Churchill. It began: “In the event of France being unable to continue in the war and becoming neutral...” The report was built on their earlier and far more substantive report ‘British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality’ already circulated on 25 May and given a fairly wide circulation in a printed, not just typed, format. The term ‘Certain Eventuality’ was, of course, a disguise for the unmentionable, the fear that France would fall. There was in addition to formal papers a spate of letters, ‘Actions this Day’ instructions and memos, to say nothing of the constant day and night meetings with ministers, officials and a wide variety of people. All this speaks to Churchill working tirelessly and with huge innovation. No wonder by 28 June his wife thought it necessary to warn him of his “rough, sarcastic and overbearing manner” and “contemptuous attitude” that were not his normal behaviour. She was a quintessential ‘toe holder’ who prevents leaders like Churchill developing Hubris Syndrome.1

  Churchill was a politician who made the ‘weather’ throughout his life but never more so than in May 1940. His decision to be Minister of Defence was very significant and a means by which he could justify calling meetings with military figures at every level without having to summon the Minister of War to be present – at that stage Anthony Eden – nor the First Lord of the Admiralty A.V. Alexander and Secretary of State for Air, Archie Sinclair. These direct messages were military
to military encounters and sometimes rough and abusive as we have already glimpsed in Churchill’s open challenge to Gort’s handling of his forces in France.

  Churchill loved the whole ambience of war. From day one on 10 May, he intervened over strategy and military appointments and wore the Chiefs of Staff to a frazzle over long alcoholic dinners that went into the early hours. Roosevelt was more hands off over detail but he, like Churchill, intervened as an effective wartime Prime Minister or President is bound to do. Both understood that the military, set on a single-minded mission of winning, can develop tunnel vision and miss the wider context in which the battlefield is placed. The role of the politician is to bring a clarity of perspective.

  Lukacs brilliantly sets these nine meetings in their wider context. He refers often to opinion poll findings and they are interesting for an appreciation of the mood outside Whitehall though my focus is on the politicians sitting around that Cabinet table. I am dubious whether any of the War Cabinet, let alone Churchill, read any such findings during the three hectic days of their deliberations. Polling was many decades away from achieving the dominant position in political decision-making it has today. Churchill knew only too well the risks of an invasion to his own life for he had no intention of going abroad. At one stage when an invasion seemed imminent, Ismay remembers him saying, “You and I will be dead in three months time” (see Chapter 6, p. 244).