by Simon Schama
Although nothing much was actually happening in these unreal months of the phoney war, many Britons still wanted it to be stopped. In the five weeks after 3 September, Chamberlain received 1860 letters urging him to do so. He felt the same way himself: ‘How I do hate and loathe this war. I never was meant to be a war minister.’ Others were more pessimistic but also more steely in their resolve. One of them was George Orwell, who had rediscovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he was a patriot.
The night before the Stalin–Hitler non-aggression pact had been announced, George Orwell dreamed that war had already broken out (a dream, or a nightmare, shared probably by many less imaginative Britons). Since coming back from Spain he had spent years denouncing the coming of war, even though he knew it was more or less inevitable. His still largely unread novel, Coming Up for Air, published in June 1939, has its anti-hero, the insurance agent George Bowling, a tubby, balding Great War veteran, desperate to get out of his stale life and return to the country town of his childhood, ‘Lower Binfield’ (standing in for Henley), a place of fresh-baked pies and big, dark fish waiting in the river’s weedy depths to be hooked. ‘Fishing’, says Bowling, is ‘the opposite of war’. Needless to say, he finds his Lower Binfield completely, almost literally, unrecognizable: a tawdry hell of cheap cafés, petrol stations, chain stores and plastic. The sentiment is Orwell at his most conventionally pastoral, lamenting the passing of an earlier England in much the same tone voiced by Clough Williams-Ellis, founder of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, in Britain and the Beast (1937), edited by Williams-Ellis and including G. M. Trevelyan, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes, who all registered the same prim dismay at pylon modernity.
Then, suddenly, Orwell takes a different tack. At a Left Book Club meeting, set around the time of Munich, a young idealistic anti-appeaser gets up and makes a Churchillian speech of defiance. Bowling tells him, ‘“Listen, son you’ve got it all wrong. In 1914 we thought it was going to be a glorious business. Well, it wasn’t. It was just a bloody mess. If it comes again, you keep out of it. Why should you get your body plugged full of lead? Keep it for some girl. You think war’s all heroism … but I tell you it isn’t like that. … All you know is that you’ve had no sleep for three days, you stink like a polecat, you’re pissing your bags with fright and your hands are so cold you can’t hold your rifle.”’ But later Bowling listens to a high-minded pacifist – ‘“Hitler? This German person? My dear fellow, I don’t think of him at all”’ – and explodes in silent nauseated rage: ‘“It’s a ghastly thing that nearly all the decent people, the people who don’t want to go around smashing faces in with spanners … can’t defend themselves against what’s coming to them, because they can’t see even when it’s under their noses. They think that England will never change and that England’s the whole world. Can’t grasp that it’s just a left-over, a tiny corner that the bombs happen to have missed.”’
But that was before Munich, before the occupation of Prague, before the Nazi-Soviet pact that Orwell read about in his breakfast papers the morning after his dream. Now, as he confessed in his 1940 essay ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940), he found himself, mysteriously, a patriot, although he hastened to say that patriotism had nothing to do with conservatism. ‘To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow [his socialist England] might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon.’ To this day, he admitted, ‘it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during “God Save the King”. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so enlightened that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.’ So even though for many reasons – his lungs, his wound – it seemed that no one wanted him to do any fighting, when it came to it George Orwell was ready to do what he could, after all, to resist Hitler.
Churchill, of course, had none of these hesitations to overcome. After the German occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain’s change of heart, Churchill became as supportive as he could of the prime minister, on the assumption that military preparations would now begin in earnest. At Chartwell, later in the spring, the anti-appeaser Harold Macmillan found him already fully mobilized, knee-deep in maps, secretaries, urgent phone calls and scribbled strategies: ‘He alone seemed to be in command when everyone else was hesitant.’ He would get his wish for action. On the day war was declared, Chamberlain, bowing to public opinion and a campaign led by the non-appeasement newspapers, in particular the staunchly Tory Daily Telegraph, offered Churchill the post of first lord of the admiralty. Famously, the admiralty then signalled the fleet: ‘Winston is back!’
It is just possible, of course, that those in the government who were still cool towards Churchill hoped he might burn his boats at the admiralty as he had done so spectacularly in the First World War. And they were not far wrong. For putting on his sailor’s peaked cap again had brought back memories of the Dardanelles – not, moreover, as a chastening lesson but rather as the nagging instance of what might have been. ‘If only’ circulated in Churchill’s mind, as in ‘if only he had had proper military backing for the naval assault on the forts’. In fact, he had never abandoned the basic strategic principle of hitting an enemy at his weakest, not strongest, point. And he spent much of the Second World War trying to find the Achilles’ heel of the Axis – North Africa, Greece, Sicily – with decidedly mixed results. His first instinct, formulated straight away, was to blockade Norwegian territorial waters and deprive the Germans of the Swedish magnetite iron ore that was critical to their munitions programme. Never mind, though, that this would mean violating Swedish and Norwegian neutrality.
Had the operation worked, that fact might have been overlooked. But in a chilling rerun of some of the blunders of 1915, nothing did work as planned. Instead of holding the Germans at bay, the expedition, launched in April 1940 after many delays, afforded an excuse for the pre-emptive strike already planned by Hitler. As the mining of Norwegian waters had been fatally held up by one of Churchill’s flying trips to Paris to persuade the French to embrace the plan, a modest German force was enabled to establish itself by 7 April, and then, embarrassingly, to frustrate attempts at a British landing. Churchill had also grievously miscalculated, as it turned out, the exposure of battle cruisers to attack from the air. The whole thing was a wretched mess and by June the only substantial British bridgehead, at Narvik, was abandoned.
As first lord of the admiralty Churchill might have been expected to take the lion’s share of the blame, yet somehow he escaped the whipping. This may have been, at least in part, because he had begun to broadcast on the radio, and had already established some of the persona – honest, resolute, intensely engaged – that was to boost public morale so powerfully during the rest of the war. He was still not at all popular with most of the Tory rank and file in the Commons, and even less popular with the Labour MPs, many of whom had memories that stretched back to the general strike and even Tonypandy. Some of his speeches in the House seemed, even to supporters like Harold Nicolson, stilted and bumbling, taking refuge in stale clouds of oratory when clear information was what was needed. In the country, however, the contrast between Churchill and Chamberlain was becoming clearer, not least because Chamberlain (beginning to suffer from what turned out to be stomach cancer) had backed into the war and somehow never seemed to manage to rouse himself from what had been a personal defeat. Churchill, on the other hand, having argued for armed resistance to the Third Reich, was flush with vindication.
By the time the Norway fiasco was due to be debated on 7 May, the Labour opposition was roiled by dissatisfaction. ‘It is not just Norway’, Clement Attlee would say in the debate. ‘Norway comes as the culmination of many discontents. People are asking why those mainly responsible for the conduct of affairs are men who have had an almost uninterrupted career of failure.’ A growing number of Tories (though still a mi
nority) took the point and made an approach to see if Labour would be receptive to the idea of a national coalition. Churchill himself remained steadfastly loyal to the government, allowing himself to be used, as Lloyd George wickedly said, ‘as an air raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues’. But his old gang were ready to roar their heads off. Leo Amery, normally one of the quieter anti-appeasers, concluded a devastating indictment of Chamberlain’s war leadership by invoking Oliver Cromwell’s famous dismissal of the Rump Parliament: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!’ And there were other surprises at the debate, the most startling being the appearance in full dress uniform of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, who seemed to be saying (the rigid upper lip made it hard to hear him) that the navy had been prevented from playing their part in Norway by being told that the army was doing such a splendid job.
Suddenly a slightly sticky parliamentary statement (which Chamberlain petulantly thought he hadn’t needed to make anyway) turned into a court martial of the government for dereliction of duty. The Labour front bench decided to divide the House, simply on a motion to adjourn. When they filed into the opposition lobby they found themselves mixing, as one of them remembered, with young Conservatives in uniform; a further 41 Tories abstained. When the roll was called and it was discovered that the government’s majority had dropped to 81, shouts of ‘Go! Go! Go!’ hounded Chamberlain as he left the House. One Tory MP started singing very loudly ‘Rule Britannia’.
To Chamberlain’s preliminary inquiry, Arthur Greenwood and the Labour leadership made it clear that a condition of their serving in a national war coalition was that it would not be under him. Only two serious candidates were possible, Halifax and Churchill, but Labour did not specify a preference. Churchill was still deeply suspect to them and most of them assumed, since many of the Tories disliked him too, that the job would go to Halifax. Nor did they mind. On 9 May Chamberlain then called a remarkable meeting that changed British history. Present were himself, Halifax and Winston. Explaining that it was beyond his power to form a coalition government, Chamberlain then asked the two men whom he should advise the king to send for after his own resignation had been accepted. There was a very long pause before Halifax, making by far the best decision of his life, said that his peerage made it impossible for him to take the post. He meant that it would be difficult for him to control his party from the Lords or to run the government as a peer. But that was disingenuous: it would have been easy to find him a seat in the Commons if that were really the objection. It was something inside Halifax’s own make-up that stopped him. Perhaps he had no stomach to be the next in the firing line for discontented Labour and Tory barrackers. Perhaps he thought, with western Europe on the point of being over-run, that to accept would be tantamount to political suicide. Chamberlain’s experience of taking the blame for Norway showed that he would in any case be an ‘honorary PM’ while Churchill ran the war without, it seemed, having to take real responsibility. Better that Churchill should actually carry the can for the disaster that was surely about to happen. Then, perhaps, Halifax could step in to clean up the mess and rally the sensible for a sensible peace.
So when Chamberlain went to the Palace and George VI asked him whom he should send for, the king may have been surprised to hear that it was not the good egg, the sound Lord Halifax whom both he and queen liked and who had been a shooting regular at Balmoral. It was Churchill who kissed the king’s hands the next afternoon on 10 May. The premiership could not have come at a more testing time. Early the same day, the Germans had invaded Holland and Belgium. A lesser man, or at least one without Churchill’s sense of historical appointment, might have flinched. But as he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last with Destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’ On Whit Monday, 13 May, when King George had been contacted personally by Queen Wilhelmina of Holland asking for help (and, if necessary, asylum for her government-in-exile), Churchill went to the Commons to deliver a short speech, shocking in its quiet, truthful sobriety, its absolute moral clarity and its defiant optimism:
I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined the Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.
The cheers, however, came overwhelmingly from the Labour benches. There was now a sense – with Clement Attlee in the small war cabinet, and Greenwood, Herbert Morrison, the one-eyed policeman’s son, and, above all, Ernest Bevin at the ministry of labour – that Churchill was their prime minister. Chamberlain had been damaged by his failure to win the trust of the unions, but that was no longer an issue since Bevin and Morrison had been given massive powers. It was, in fact, the realization of that most unideological trade unionist Bevin’s passion for genuine management-union cooperation. War had brought those two Britains back together.
And however the Tories felt about Churchill, the speeches of May, the Commons speech repeated for radio, and the almost equally extraordinary prime ministerial broadcast of 19 May in which he had the unenviable task of announcing the German breakthrough into France three days earlier, steeling the public for a battle ahead ‘for all that Britain is, and all that Britain means’, irreversibly changed the way the country felt about him. A primitive opinion poll conducted in 1941 found that 78 per cent of those asked approved of Churchill’s leadership, and that measure of appreciation was never to diminish significantly throughout the war.
Many years later Clement Attlee wrote that, if someone asked him, ‘What, exactly, Winston did to win the war, I would say, “talk about it”.’ Ed Murrow, the American news correspondent, said much the same when he wrote of Churchill’s mobilization of words. The effect of his speeches on British morale is incalculable – meaning, literally, that despite most of those early opinion-soundings it can never be precisely measured. But anyone of my generation (born as the war ended) who talks to anyone of my parents’ generation knows, at least anecdotally, that those speeches can be described, without hyperbole, as transforming. Some 70 per cent of the country listened whenever the prime minister spoke. And in stark contrast to what had been happening in the phoney war, his words bound parliament and the rank and file of the political parties firmly to the war government. They also gripped the attention – as they were meant to – of both politicians and people in the United States and anywhere else that an English-speaking population had radios. They seriously irritated the Nazis and arguably contributed to Hitler making ill-advised strategic decisions such as switching bombing raids from British airfields to civilian centres. But most of all they made Britain – not just England – a whole nation again. Even Orwell, who needless to say had deep misgivings about demagoguery, breathed a sigh of relief in May 1940 that at last the country had a leader who understood ‘that wars are won by fighting’.
Of course, Churchill had been revelling in oratory for his entire life, ever since he had stood on top of Mrs Ormiston Chant’s screen in the Empire, Leicester Square, in November 1894, and certainly since he had graduated with honours from the Lloyd George school of verbal manhandling. Occasionally, perhaps more than occasionally, he had been guilty of shameless grandstanding; sometimes the reach for Shakespearean diction and cadence had been a reach too far and the effect thudded into hollow bombast. But this all changed in May 1940. Churchill felt tha
t he was, in some peculiar way, possessed by his nation’s history. This gave him the strength and the sincerity to make millions of Britons feel, through listening to him, that they too, without ever seeking the moment, had become embodiments of the British will to endure in freedom. Blue-blooded or not, Churchill had an almost perfect ear for what the public needed to hear. This was no small achievement in a country where social divisions were marked, above all, by accent and mannerisms of speech. But Churchill’s diction, however romantically high-flown, was never high-class in the sense of being the nasal twang of the point-to-point upper-crust, much less the thin refinement of philosophical Oxbridge. That his voice was so peculiar – by turns a growl, a rumble, a chuckle, a vocal swoop and, sometimes, a rising shout – detached it from any obvious class and made it instead a voice for, if not exactly of, the people; somehow both grandiose and familiar, both aristocratic and democratic. Everything Churchill did was calculated to have this same street-wise social cheekiness – not least the famous ‘V’ for victory sign, a reversed and therefore ostensibly cleaned-up version of a famously profane gesture, deliberately designed to retain something of the original’s up-yours defiance.
Many of the great speeches followed a set structure, no less effective for being so often repeated: an opening motif of solemn, if not tragically weighted, confessional frankness (‘Tonight I must speak to you’; ‘The situation is very serious’); a slow movement in which the solemn theme gets elaborated into detail; a sparkling scherzo of sly jokes at the expense of Hitler and the ‘Nahzees’, (‘Some chicken, some neck’); and a great finale of ferocious resolution, comradely obstinacy and often poetic salvation, the coda delivered with a glorious, almost offhand dip of the voice (‘But westward, LOOK [voice up]. The land is [voice down] bright!’).