Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  In 1941, Churchill devoted immense energy to wooing the United States. But in 1940, once his June appeals to Roosevelt had failed, for several weeks he did not write to the president at all, and dismissed suggestions for a British propaganda offensive. “Propaganda is all very well,”118 he said, “but it is events that make the world. If we smash the Huns here, we shall need no propaganda in the United States … Now we must live. Next year we shall be winning. The year after that we shall triumph. But if we can hold the Germans in this coming month of July … our position will be quite different from today.”

  Yet how to “hold them”? U.S. general Raymond Lee, military attaché at the London embassy, wrote: “One queer thing119 about the present situation is that it is one which has never been studied at the Staff College. For years [British officers] had studied our [U.S. Civil War] Valley campaign, operations in India, Afghanistan, Egypt and Europe, had done landings on a hostile shore, but it had never occurred to them that some day they might have to defend the non-combatants of a country at war.” An MP recounted Churchill saying at this time: “I don’t know what we’ll fight120 them with—we shall have to slosh them on the head with bottles—empty ones, of course.” This joke was almost certainly apocryphal, but as the prime minister himself observed of the manner in which spurious Churchilliana accrued, he became “a magnet for iron filings.”

  On June 8, Britain’s Home Forces boasted an inventory of just 54 2-pounder antitank guns; 420 field guns, with 200 rounds of ammunition apiece; 613 medium and heavy guns, with 150 rounds for each; and 105 medium and heavy tanks and 395 light tanks. There were only 2,300 Bren light machine guns and 70,000 rifles. Visiting beach defences at St. Margaret’s Bay, in Kent, on June 26, Churchill was told by the local brigadier that he had three antitank guns, with six rounds of ammunition apiece. Not one shot must be wasted on practise, said the prime minister. He dismissed a suggestion that London might, like Paris, be declared an open city. The British capital’s dense streets, he said, offered peerless opportunities for local defence. So dire was the shortage of small arms that, when a consignment of World War I–vintage rifles arrived from the United States on July 10, Churchill decreed that they must be distributed within forty-eight hours. He rejected a proposal that Britain should try to deter Spain from entering the war by promising talks about the disputed sovereignty of Gibraltar as soon as peace returned. The Spanish, he said, would know full well that if Britain won, there would be no deal.

  His wit never faltered. When he heard that six people had suffered heart failure following an air-raid warning, he observed that he himself was more likely to die of overeating. Yet he did not want to perish quite yet, “when so many interesting things121 were happening.” Told that the Luftwaffe had bombed ironworks owned by the family of Stanley Baldwin, the archappeasing thirties prime minister, he muttered, “very ungrateful of them.” When his wife, Clementine, described how she had marched disgusted out of a service at St. Martin-in-the-Field after hearing its preacher deliver a pacifist sermon, Churchill said, “You ought to have cried ‘Shame,’122 desecrating the House of God with lies.” He turned to Jock Colville and said, “Tell the Minister of Information with a view to having the man pilloried.” General Sir Bernard Paget exclaimed to Colville: “What a wonderful tonic he is!”

  Between June and September 1940, and to a lessening degree for eighteen months thereafter, the minds of the British government and people were fixed upon the threat that Hitler would dispatch an army to invade their island. It is a perennially fascinating question, how far such a peril was ever realistic—or perceived as such by Winston Churchill. The collapse of France and expulsion of the British Army from the Continent represented the destruction of the strategic foundations upon which British policy was founded. Yet if the German victory in France had been less swift, if the Allies had become engaged in more protracted fighting, the cost in British and French blood would have been vastly greater, while it is hard to imagine any different outcome. John Kennedy was among the senior British soldiers who perceived this: “We should have had an enormous army123 in France if we had been allowed to go on long enough, and it would have lost its equip[men]t all the same.” Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of Fighter Command, claimed that on news of the French surrender “I went on my knees124 and thanked God,” because no further British fighters need be vainly destroyed on the Continent. Only German perceptions of the BEF’s marginal role permitted so many of Britain’s soldiers to escape from the battlefield by sea not once, but twice, in June 1940. No staff college war game would have allowed so indulgent an outcome. Though it was hard to see matters in such terms at the time, if French defeat had been inevitable, Britain escaped from its consequences astonishingly lightly.

  The British in June 1940 believed that they were threatened by imminent invasion followed by likely annihilation. Unsurprisingly, they thought themselves the focus of Hitler’s ambitions. Few comprehended his obsession with the east. They could not know that Germany was neither militarily prepared nor psychologically committed to launch a massive amphibious operation across the Channel. The Wehrmacht needed months to digest the conquest of France and the Low Countries. The Nazis’ perception of Britain and its ruling class was distorted by prewar acquaintance with so many aristocratic appeasers. Now, they confidently awaited the displacement of Churchill’s government by one which acknowledged realities. “Are the English giving in? No sure signs visible yet,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on June 26. “Churchill still talks big. But then he is not England.” Some historians have expressed surprise that Hitler prevaricated about invasion. Yet his equivocation was matched by the Allies later in the war. For all the aggressive rhetoric of Churchill, the British for years nursed hopes that Germany would collapse without an Allied landing in France. The Americans were much relieved that Japan surrendered without being invaded. No belligerent nation risks a massive amphibious operation on a hostile shore until all other options have been exhausted. Germany in 1940 proved no exception.

  Churchill’s people might have slept a little easier through that summer had they perceived that they were more happily placed to withstand the siege and bombardment of their island than any other conceivable strategic scenario. Their army had been delivered from the need to face the Wehrmacht on the battlefield, and indeed would not conduct major operations on the Continent for more than three years. The Royal Navy, despite its Norwegian and Dunkirk losses, remained an immensely powerful force. A German fleet of towed barges moving across the Channel at a speed of only three or four knots would have remained within range of warship guns for many hours. On July 1, the German navy had only one heavy and two light cruisers, together with four destroyers and some E-boats, available for duty as escorts. The Royal Air Force was better organised and equipped to defend Britain against bomber attack than for any other operation of war. If a German army secured a beachhead, Churchill’s land forces were unfit to expel it. But in the summer of 1940 England’s moat, those twenty-one miles of choppy sea between rival chalk cliffs, represented a formidable, probably decisive obstacle to Hitler’s landlubbing army.

  Among the government’s first concerns was that of ensuring that the Vichy French fleet did not become available to Hitler. During days of Cabinet argument on this issue, Churchill at one moment raised the possibility that the Americans might be persuaded to purchase the warships. In the event, however, a more direct and brutal option was adopted. Horace Walpole wrote two centuries earlier: “No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the lengths that may be necessary.” At Mers el-Kébir, Oran, on July 3, French commanders rejected an ultimatum from Admiral Sir James Somerville, commanding the Royal Navy’s Force H offshore, either to scuttle their fleet or sail to join the British. The subsequent bombardment and destruction of France’s warships was one of the most ruthless acts by a democracy in the annals of war. It resulted from a decision such as only Churchill would plausibly have taken. Yet it commands the respect of post
erity, as it did of Franklin Roosevelt, as an earnest of Britain’s iron determination to sustain the struggle. Churchill told the House of Commons the next day, “We had hoped until the afternoon that our terms would be accepted without bloodshed.” As to passing judgement on the action, he left this “with confidence to Parliament. I leave it also to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and to history.”

  As MPs cheered and waved their order papers in a curiously tasteless display of enthusiasm for an action which, however necessary, had cost 1,250 French lives, Churchill resumed his seat with tears pouring down his face. He, the Francophile, perceived the bitter fruits that had been plucked at Oran. He confided later: “It was a terrible decision125, like taking the life of one’s own child to save the State.” He feared that the immediate consequence would be to drive Vichy to join Germany in arms against Britain. But, at a moment when the Joint Intelligence Committee was warning that invasion seemed imminent, he absolutely declined to acquiesce in the risk that French capital ships might screen a German armada.

  Pétain’s regime did not declare war, though French bitterness about Oran persisted for years to come. The bombardment was less decisive in its strategic achievement than Churchill claimed, because one French battle cruiser escaped, and a powerful fleet still lay at Toulon under Vichy orders. But actions sometimes have consequences which remain unperceived for long afterwards. This was the case with the attack on Mers el-Kébir, followed by the failure two months later of a Free French attempt to take over Dakar, capital of France’s African colony Senegal. When Gen. Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator, submitted to Hitler his shopping list for joining the Axis, it was headed by a demand that Hitler should transfer to Spain French colonies in Africa. Yet Vichy France’s rejection of both British diplomatic advances and military threats, together with the refusal of most of France’s African colonies to “rally” to de Gaulle, persuaded Hitler to hope that Pétain’s nation would soon become his fighting ally. He therefore refused to satisfy Franco at French expense. The attack on Oran, a painful necessity126, and Dakar, an apparent fiasco, contributed significantly to keeping Spain out of the war.

  One part of the British Commonwealth offered no succour to the “mother country”: the Irish Free State, bitterly hostile to Britain since it gained independence in 1922, sustained nominal allegiance by a constitutional quirk, under the terms of the island’s partition treaty. Churchill had heaped scorn upon Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 cession of Britain’s Irish “treaty ports” to the Dublin government. As first lord of the Admiralty, in 1939, he contemplated military action against Eire, as the southern Irish dominion was known. Amid the desperate circumstances of June 1940, however, he responded cautiously to a suggestion by Chamberlain—of all people—that Ireland should be obliged by force to yield up its harbours, which might play a critical role in keeping open Britain’s Atlantic lifeline. Churchill opposed this, fearing a hostile reaction in the United States. Instead, the British government urged Lord Craigavon, prime minister of the Protestant north, which remained part of the United Kingdom, to seek a meeting with Irish prime minister Eamon de Valera to discuss the defence of their common island. Craigavon, like most of his fellow Ulstermen, loathed the Catholic southerners. He dismissed this notion out of hand.

  Yet in late June, London presented a remarkable and radical secret proposal to Dublin: Britain would make a principled commitment to a postwar united Ireland, in return for immediate access to Irish ports and bases. Britain’s ambassador in Dublin reported de Valera’s stony response. The taoiseach would commit himself only to the neutrality of a united Ireland, though he said unconvincingly that he “might” enter the war after the British government made a public declaration of commitment to union.

  The British government nonetheless urged Dublin to conduct talks with the Belfast regime about a prospective union endorsed by Britain, in return for Eire’s belligerence. Chamberlain told the Cabinet, “I do not believe that the Ulster government would refuse to play their part to bring about so favourable a development.” De Valera again declined to accept deferred payment. MacDonald cabled London, urging Churchill to offer personal assurances. The prime minister wrote in the margin of this message: “But all contingent upon127 Ulster agreeing & S. Ireland coming into the war.”

  On June 26, Chamberlain belatedly reported these exchanges to Craigavon, saying: “You will observe that the document128 takes the form of an enquiry only, because we have not felt it right to approach you officially with a request for your assent unless we had first a binding assurance from Eire that they would, if the assent were given, come into the war … If therefore they refuse the plan you are in no way committed, and if they accept you are still free to make your own comments or objections as may think fit.” The Ulsterman cabled back: “Am profoundly shocked and disgusted129 by your letter making suggestions so far-reaching behind my back and without any pre-consultation with me. To such treachery to loyal Ulster I will never be a party.” Chamberlain, in turn, responded equally angrily to what he perceived as Craigavon’s insufferable parochialism. He concluded, “Please remember the serious nature130 of the situation which requires that every effort be made to meet it.”

  The War Cabinet, evidently unimpressed by Craigavon’s anger, now strengthened its proposal to Dublin: “This declaration would take the form131 of a solemn undertaking that the Union is to become at an early date an accomplished fact from which there shall be no turning back.” When Craigavon was informed, he responded: “Your telegram only confirms my confidential information and conviction de Valera is under German dictation and far past reasoning with. He may purposely protract negotiations till enemy has landed. Strongly advocate immediate naval occupation of harbours and military advance south.”

  Craigavon asserted in a personal letter to Churchill that Ulster would only participate in an All-Ireland Defence Force “if British martial law is imposed throughout the island.” The two men met in London on July 7. There is no record of their conversation. It is reasonable to assume that it was frosty, but by then Churchill could assuage the Ulsterman’s fears. Two days earlier, de Valera had finally rejected the British plan. He, like many Irishmen, was convinced that Britain was doomed to lose the war. He doubted Churchill’s real willingness to coerce Craigavon. If he ever seriously contemplated accepting London’s terms, he also probably feared that once committed to belligerence, Ireland would become a British puppet.

  Churchill makes no mention of the Irish negotiation in his war memoirs. Since the British offer to Dublin was sensational, this suggests that recollection of it brought no pleasure to the prime minister. Given de Valera’s implacable hostility, the Irish snub was inevitable. But it represented a massive miscalculation by the Irish leader. Ernest Bevin wrote in confidence to an academic friend who was urging a deal on a united Ireland: “There are difficulties which appear132 at the moment almost insurmountable. You see, de Valera’s policy is, even if we get a united Ireland, he would still remain neutral. On that, he is immovable. Were it not for this attitude, I believe a solution would be easy … You may rest assured that we are watching every possible chance.” If Ireland had entered the war on the Allied side at any time, even after the United States became a belligerent in December 1941 and Allied victory was assured, American cash would have flooded into the country, perhaps advancing Ireland’s economic takeoff by two generations.

  The exchanges of July were not quite the end of the story. In December 1940, Churchill suggested in a letter to President Roosevelt that, “if the Government of Eire133 would show its solidarity with the democracies of the English-speaking world … a Council of Defence of all Ireland could be set up out of which the unity of the island would probably in some form or other emerge after the war.” Here was a suggestion much less explicit than that of the summer, obviously modified by the diminution of British peril. It is impossible to know whether, if de Valera had acceded to the British proposal of June 1940, Churchi
ll would indeed have obliged the recalcitrant Ulster Protestants to accept union with the south. Given his high-handed treatment of other dominions and colonies in the course of the war—not least the surrender of British overseas bases to the United States—it seems by no means impossible. So dire was Britain’s predicament, of such vital significance in the U-boat war were Irish ports and airfields, that it seemed worth almost any price to secure them. But the gambit failed, leaving Britain and Ireland alike losers.

  Churchill threw himself into the struggle to prepare his island to resist invasion. He decreed that if the Germans landed, all measures including poison gas were to be employed against them. On July 6, he inspected an exercise in Kent. “Winston was in great form,”134 Ironside wrote in his diary, “and gave us lunch at Chartwell in his cottage. Very wet but nobody minded at all.” A consignment of 250,000 rifles and 300 old 75mm field guns arrived from America—poor weapons, but desperately welcome. Ironside expected the German invasion on July 9, and was surprised when it did not come. On July 10, instead, the Luftwaffe launched its first big raid on Britain, by seventy aircraft against southern Wales dockyards. Churchill knew this was the foretaste of a heavy and protracted air assault. Two days later, he visited RAF Hurricane squadrons at Kenley. Straining to harness every aid to public morale, he demanded that military bands should play in the streets. He urged attention to gas masks, because he feared that Hitler would unleash chemical weapons. He resisted the evacuation of children from cities, and deplored the shipment of the offspring of the rich to sanctuary in the United States. He argued vigorously against overstringent rationing, and deplored pessimism wherever it was encountered. Dill, less than two months head of the army, was already provoking his mistrust: the CIGS “strikes me as tired135, disheartened and over-impressed with the might of Germany,” wrote the prime minister to Eden. In Churchill’s eyes, all through the long months which followed, defeatism was the only crime beyond forgiveness.