The turning point. Two accounts. – The awesomeness of the German tide. – Black Fortnight. – Problems of British morale. -Distrust of Churchill. – Opinions and sentiments. – “Outwardly calm, inwardly anxious.”
This book attempts to reconstruct the history of five days that could have changed the world. The setting is London, and the five days are Friday through Tuesday, 24 to 28 May 1940. Then and there Adolf Hitler came closest to winning the Second World War, his war.
One man who knew how close Hitler had come to his ultimate victory was Winston Churchill. In the years after the war he gave the tide The Hinge of Fate to the fourth volume of his War Memoirs. That volume dealt with the year 1942, near the end of which the Germans were turned back on many fronts. In November 1942 he said to the British people that this was not yet the beginning of the end but perhaps the end of the beginning. November 1942 was the military hinge of fate on the battlefields of Egypt, North Africa, and Russia: the military turning points. Even then Britain could not win the war. In the end America and Russia did. But in May 1940 Churchill was the one who did not lose it. Then and there he saved Britain, and Europe, and Western civilization. And about that hinge of fate his War Memoirs— essentially his History of the Second World War—are largely silent.
In the history of states and of peoples a turning point is often a battle or an episode during a revolution: more precisely, a sudden shifting of events and movements in a battle or during a revolution. A turning point is not a milestone; the latter is a numerically fixable place, foreseeable, linear, and sequential. A turning point may occur in a person’s mind; it may mean a change of direction; it has consequences that are multiple and unpredictable, consequences that are more often than not recognizable only in retrospect. A turning point may sometimes be foreseeable, but not with certainty’. In this case the moment came late on Tuesday, 28 May. It was the resolution of a struggle which, at that very moment, Churchill had won. He declared that England would go on fighting, no matter what happened. No matter what happened: there would be no negotiating with Hitler. Here is his reconstruction of what he said to the Outer Cabinet:
It was Tuesday, May 28, and I did not attend the House until that day week. There was no advantage to be gained by a further statement in the interval, nor did Members express a wish for one. But everyone realized that the fate of our Army and perhaps much else might well be decided by then. “The House,” I said, “should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings. I have only to add that nothing which may happen in this battle can in any way relieve us of our duty to defend the world cause to which we have vowed ourselves; nor should it destroy our confidence in our power to make our way, as on former occasions in our history, through disaster and through grief to the ultimate defeat of our enemies.” I had not seen many of my colleagues outside the War Cabinet, except individually, since the formation of the Government, and I thought it right to have a meeting in my room at the House of Commons of all the Ministers of Cabinet rank other than the War Cabinet Members. We were perhaps twenty-five round the table. I described the course of events, and I showed them plainly where we were, and all that was in the balance. Then I said quite casually, and not treating it as a point of special significance: “Of course, whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on.”
There occurred a demonstration which, considering the character of the gathering—twenty-five experienced politicians and Parliament men, who represented all the different points of view, whether right or wrong, before the war—-surprised me. Quite a number seemed to jump up from the table and came running to my chair, shouting and patting me on the back. There is no doubt that had I at this juncture faltered at all in leading the nation, I should have been hurled out of office. I was sure that every Minister was ready to be killed quite soon, and have all his family and possessions destroyed, rather than give in. In this they represented the House of Commons and almost all the people. It fell to me in these coming days and months to express their sentiments on suitable occasions. This I was able to do, because they were mine also. There was a white glow, overpowering, sublime, which ran through our island from end to end.1
This is an inspiring passage—Churchillian, imaginative, descriptive, telling. It is not devoid of truthfulness. There is in it, too, a glimmer of what was perhaps Churchill’s finest virtue, his magnanimity: when he suggests that his indomitable resolution to die, if he must, was only a representation of the resolution of others.2 But what is missing is significant. Here, and indeed in all those long chapters of Their Finest Hour, Churchill wrote nothing about the preceding four days, when he had had to struggle to get his way in the War Cabinet. It had been his plan to summon this somewhat extraordinary meeting of the Outer Cabinet, where, as he knew, his supporters were potentially vocal and actually numerous. Moreover, what he said then was not said “quite casually, and not treating it as a point of special significance.”
There is a fuller description of this meeting in Hugh Dalton’s memoirs and his diary. Their substantial tone does not differ much from Churchill’s. Dalton was an admirer of Churchill. (“He is quite magnificent. The man, the only man we have, for this hour.”) But some of Dalton’s details are worth considering. “He was determined,” Dalton said of Churchill, “to prepare public opinion for bad tidings, and it would of course be said, and with some truth, that what was now happening in Northern France would be the greatest British military defeat for many centuries.” Churchill said, Dalton recalls,
“I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering negotiations with That Man.”3
It was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms from Germany than if we went on and fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet — that would be called “disarmament”—our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up — “under Mosley or some such person.” And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other side, we had immense reserves and advantages. Therefore, he said, “We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.”4 There was a murmur of approval round the table, in which I think Amery, Lord Lloyd and I [Dalton] were loudest. Not much more was said. No one expressed even the faintest flicker of dissent. … It is quite clear that whereas the Old Umbrella5—neither he nor other members of the War Cabinet were at this meeting—wanted to run very early, Winston’s bias is all the other way.
Eighteen days before this, on 10 May, Churchill had become prime minister. Late that afternoon, he was driven back from Buckingham Palace to Admiralty House, where he then lived. Behind the driver he sat with Inspector W. H. Thompson, his bodyguard. Churchill was silent. Then Thompson thought it proper to congratulate Churchill. “I only wish the position had come your way in better times for you have an enormous task.” Tears came into Churchill’s eyes. He said to Thompson: “God alone knows how great it is. I hope it is not too late. I am very much afraid it is. We can only do our best.”6 During the next fourteen days came disaster upon disaster. I am compelled to sum them up at the beginning, after which to the five days in London I shall turn.
“I hope it is not too late. I am very much afraid it is.” Note that Churchill said this at the moment of his personal triumph, and before the battle in Western Europe began to unfold. But then he had never underestimated Hitler. What even he did not know was that the next fortnight would see Hitler’s greatest triumphs: unimaginable, irresistible, perhaps final.
Nearly sixty years after these events, at the end of the twentieth century, the widespread perception is this: Hitler was a fanatic, a dictator, who started a war and turned most of the world against him, a war in which he was bound to fail. There is some truth in this view but not enough. Its shortcoming may be summed up in six words: he was not bound to fail. He represented an enormous tide in the affairs of the world in the twentieth century. The force of this tide consisted of the energy, the discipline, the confidence and the obedience, and the vitality of the German people whom he succeeded in uniting beyond the accomplishments of any other leader in their history. He could rely on a national army whose achievements turned out to be awesome, the wonder of the world. Moreover—beyond Germany, and in the minds of many people — Hitler’s rule, his regime and his ideas, represented a new primary force, beside the corroding alternatives of liberal democracy and “International” Communism. For ten years the tide rose, pounding and pouring over obstacles that disappeared beneath its foaming might. In May 1940 it not only seemed irresistible: in many places and in many ways it was.
Hitler became chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. The significance, let alone the importance, of this event went largely unrecognized. Evidence for this exists in the reporting and the commentaries of virtually every leading newspaper of the world.7 His personal abilities were underestimated, indeed on occasion ridiculed. The German conservative political elite, who helped to arrange his nomination to the chancellorship, thought that they would be able to manage him. The opposite happened. He made them his servitors. More important: soon he became the most popular leader in the history of the Germans, perhaps the most schooled people in the world. The bitterness and the humiliation that had affected most Germans after their loss of the First World War ebbed away; what succeeded it was a rising wave of national self-confidence. To an astonishing degree Hitler won the trust of the great majority of the German people.
For a while his abilities as a statesman went on being unrecognized. That would change, too, and soon. In three years his Third German Reich replaced France as the leading power in Europe, despite France’s multiple alliances, while Hitler did not yet have a single contractual ally. Treaty after treaty restricting Germany militarily, politically, economically, diplomatically, he flung aside. His prestige—and not only among his own people — did not diminish; it rose. Soon the leaders of many European states were seeking his goodwill — or at least they were seeking to avoid any impression that they might be his opponents. Mussolini thought it proper to align himself with this German leader who seemed to be representative of the wave of the future. Less simple were the inclinations of the British governments, of the British Conservative Party, and of many British people. They were inclined to give this new Germany at least the benefit of the doubt. Their policy of appeasing Germany had many motives. We shall have to disentangle some of them later. These inclinations were already apparent during the prime ministership of Stanley Baldwin, but their prototypical representative and proponent was Neville Chamberlain, who became prime minister in 1937. With regard to appeasement his most vocal and determined opponent was Winston Churchill, whose public and political reputation in 1937 stood at what was probably the lowest point in his long career.
It was at that very time that Adolf Hitler chose to plan the imposition of his power beyond the frontiers of Germany, transforming the map of Europe. There were still people who thought he had no talent for statesmanship. Soon they would be dumbfounded or at least numbed. In November 1937 Hitler told his generals that they might as well prepare for war, even though the contingency was not yet immediate, since England, and France dependent on England, had probably written off Austria and Czechoslovakia. This estimate was accurate. A fortnight later it was strengthened when Chambcrlain (unaware, of course, of what Hitler was planning) chose his confidant Lord Halifax to travel to Germany on a goodwill visit, very much including a meeting with Hitler. Halifax was, as was his wont, cautious (in this case, cautious rather than circumspect), but he did suggest to Hitler that the British government would not oppose Germany as long as Germany would achieve its ambitions without war. In February 1938 Anthony Eden resigned as Chamberlain’s foreign secretary; his place was taken by Halifax. Churchill recorded in his War Memoirs that he instandy recognized the portent of this change: he, a champion sleeper, now spent a largely sleepless night.8
1938 was Hitler’s year. In March he occupied and annexed Austria without firing a single shot, indeed accompanied by the enthusiasm of the mass of the Austrian people. Immediately he turned on Czechoslovakia, which he succeeded in breaking up, adding a large portion of it, with millions of German-speaking people, to his Greater German Reich and reducing the rest to a near-satellite status. This despite the fact that, unlike Austria, Czechoslovakia had military alliances: with Soviet Russia and, more important, with France, behind which Britain seemed to stand. Seemed to stand: for that was the crux of the matter. France would not go to war except together with Britain, and Britain was not willing to do so. The main reason for this was British unpreparedness — militarily, to be sure; but beyond and beneath such practical calculations there was the unpreparedness of the people, of British opinion, and of the leaders of the Dominions for another European war for the sake of Czechoslovakia. Even that was not all. There was the reasoning of Chamberlain, not merely to delay but to avoid a confrontation with Hitler, to whom he was inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, even in extreme situations. Hence the last-minute conference at Munich when Czechoslovakia was surrendered and when Chamberlain was not only relieved but, at least temporarily, encouraged by the prospect of an Anglo-German understanding which could mean Peace In Our Time. Churchill attacked Chamberlain, but to no avail. In a great speech in the House of Commons, Churchill declared that this was all wrong, that “we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.” His speech was telling and prophetic, but only in retrospect. Except among a small and anxious minority, Churchill’s reputation and his influence were still at a low ebb; he was nearly censured by his own constituency. To this we may add that in one important respect Churchill was wrong. It would have been disastrous for the Western democracies to go to war in October 1938.9 He may have been right, morally speaking; practically, he was wrong.
Hitler, at the same time, appeared as the greatest leader and statesman that the German people had had in one thousand years — as well as the most powerful national leader in Europe, perhaps even in the world. But he was not made in the classic stamp of a statesman. He was relentless, pressed by a deep sense that time was working against him. He was not content to digest his conquests and to solidify his triumphs. In March 1939 he made a grave mistake. He marched into Prague, incorporating the broken remnant of Czechoslovakia into his Greater German Empire. Thereby he broke his word of six months before (“my last territorial demand,” and so on) as well as the asseveration of his main purpose, that of the uniting in one Reich all German peoples, to the exclusion of non-German ones, along the principle of national self-determination (a principle that, alas, had been proclaimed and espoused by Woodrow Wilson). The result was a belated, but instant, revolution of British opinion. Chamberlain’s first inclination was to accept the inevitable, that is, Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, the end result of a process that, after all, had been foreordained in Munich. But the pressure of public opinion and the press was now too much. Even Chamberlain’s foreign secretary, Halifax, was no longer in favor of appeasing Hitler. Halifax’s influence contributed considerably to Chamberlain’s speech at Birmingham, three days after Hitler’s arrival in Prague. It was in effect a declaration of the British government: “thus far and no further” One week after Prague Hitler took another sliver of former German territory from Lithuania, and the German propaganda apparatus started a campaign against Poland. Now the British government advanced a guarantee to Poland, with the aim of deterring Hitler. It did not work; but, in any event, even Chamberlain was now compelled to envision the prospect of a war. And now Churchill’s reputation started to rise. He did not have the habit of saying “I told you so,” but about Hitler he seemed to have been proved right. During the summer of 1939 Chamberlain was still inclined to find some kind of an accommodation with Hitler. But the constraints and conditions were too strenuous for that. On the day that Hitler invaded Poland, Chamberlain invited Churchill into his cabinet, as the first lord of the Admiralty. Until the last moment Chamberlain was reluctant to declare war on Germany. But by 3 September he had no choice.
Hitler hoped that this would not happen. In this he was wrong. But he was not wrong in knowing that Chamberlain and the British went to war reluctantly—indeed, that apart from their declarations of war, the British and the French would do little or nothing, except perhaps on the seas. The still-accepted idea that while the German armies were fighting in Poland an Allied ground offensive across the so-called Siegfried Line would not only have been possible but decisive is groundless: it was not possible because it was not planned, and it was not planned because it was not possible. The result was eight months of what American journalists dubbed the Phoney War (Reluctant War may have been a better term). During it Churchill’s popularity grew, to the extent that many people were inclined to overlook his mistakes. All this came to a head when Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway in early April 1940 — perhaps his most daring move of the entire war. The British response was miserable. The navy missed the Germans; it was unable to prevent German landings along the long coast of Norway; where British troops were landed, here and there, they soon retreated rather abjectly; they were outmarched and outfought by the Germans nearly everywhere. Churchill was responsible for much of this. It was his attempt to establish a British presence along the Norwegian coast that made Hitler decide to invade that country; and Churchill’s directives to the British fleet were often wrongheaded.
Still, the defeat in Norway brought down the Chamberlain government. There arose in the House of Commons a heated and confused debate propelled by the rising sentiment that Chamberlain was not the right person to lead Britain through the war. There was a significant vote when dozens of his own Conservative Party members deserted him. Churchill stood by him, unreservedly loyal, though knowing that his own hour might have come. On 9 May Chamberlain concluded that he had to resign. There must be a National Government, including ministers from the Labour Party. His preferred successor was Halifax. Most of the Conservatives preferred Halifax. The king preferred Halifax. There was still plenty of distrust, (even though momentarily latent) of Churchill. But Halifax demurred. There perhaps were three reasons for this. He was a member of the House of Lords, which presented a constitutional problem, though one that could have been fixed. He may or may not have been acceptable to Labour, though that too was not certain. What decided the matter for him was his own judgment that within a Halifax cabinet Churchill the warrior would be unmanageable. Late in the afternoon of 10 May Churchill went to Buckingham Palace, and returned as prime minister.
Eight years later he wrote that he was “conscious of a profound sense of relief” : “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene.”10 But: had he not said to Inspector Thompson, “I hope it is not too late”? Behind the horseman sat black care.
With every reason. There was a fateful coincidence on that historic day. “Coincidences are spiritual puns” (Chesterton). On 10 May 1940 the pun was more than spiritual. Early that morning the German invasion of Western Europe began. Hitler, who had not only planned it but chosen its main design — again he would be underestimated, this time as a strategist and military leader — was at his headquarters, near the German-Belgian border, watching the campaign develop. This thunderclap on 10 May had nothing to do with Churchill’s ascent to the prime ministership; that had been virtually decided the day before. Nor do we have any evidence that, when the news of Churchill’s appointment reached Hitler at the end of the day, he was affected by it. He had a contempt for Churchill because of Churchill’s insistent opposition to him and because of what he knew about Churchill’s character and personal habits; he underestimated Churchill — wrongly, as things turned out, though that would not be apparent until many months later. He thought that Churchill would not last long, that Churchill’s belligerent manner and his warlike instincts were not shared by most people of the British establishment.
Again Hitler was not altogether wrong. When Churchill appeared in the House of Commons three days after his appointment, he was greeted with little or no enthusiasm by the Conservative Party, many members of which now seemed to have been in a mild state of emotional hangover, slightly ashamed of the burst of emotion that had helped to bring Chamberlain down. Lord Davidson wrote to Stanley Baldwin: “The Tories don’t trust Winston.… After the first clash of war is over it may well be that a sounder Government may emerge.”11 Churchill knew how dependent he was on the Conservative Party, and on Chamberlain. He treated the latter with a compound of prudence and magnanimity. (“I am in your hands,” he wrote to Chamberlain.) He brought a few new people into his cabinet, but the composition of it did not change drastically. All of this is known by historians, and we shall return to evidences of a distrust for Churchill. When on 13 May he made his famous “blood, sweat, toil and tears” speech, so impressive when read now, and emotionally honest, it was not too well received by many Conservatives in the House.
But it was the greater and dramatic and terrifying flow of events that we must now consider: the fact that the first fortnight of Churchill’s prime ministership was a time of crashing disasters. Disasters for Britain and Churchill, triumphs for Germany and Hitler. Here was the proof of a new model German army, welded together by an iron sense of national self-confidence, directed by a new model of generalship, equipped with new visions and new armor for a new kind of warfare. Three days after their start the Germans broke across the French lines at Sedan. Holland surrendered. Brussels was abandoned. On the tenth day the Germans were at the English Channel, which they had not been able to reach during the entire First World War. The French and British armies in Flanders and Belgium were trapped. In many places the French fought not at all. Churchill flew over the Channel to Paris twice, encouraging their leaders, but with not much effect. Some of their military chiefs and politicians were beginning to consider the necessity for an armistice with the Germans, through the mediation of Mussolini. Mussolini all but declared that Italy would soon enter the war on Hitler’s side. The plan for a French-British counterattack, aimed at cutting through the nose of the advancing German armored crocodile,12 did not come about. The British, and Churchill, were now forced to begin considering the removal of the British Expeditionary Force across the Channel — if that were possible at all. British and French troops were pushed back to Boulogne and Calais, presently surrounded by the Germans. And if the French fought badly or not at all, the British in Belgium fought not much better (except, perhaps, in the air, but there, too, their attempts at bombing important bridges were useless). On the ground, except for one failed counter-move at Arras, the BEF had engaged in no real battles with the Germans; its falling back was more orderly than that of the French, but still it was retreat after retreat.
The Germans seemed invincible, and the world was stunned. So was Hitler. He hardly believed his luck. For once, he was more cautious than were many of his generals. For once, his self-confidence — his greatest asset, which, throughout his career, rested on his feral, instinctive understanding of his opponents’ weaknesses — wobbled a bit. He was nervous and worried. He did not quite realize what his German troops were capable of. During the days of his army’s most rapid advances — the seventeenth and the eighteenth — he kept warning his generals against the dangers of a British-French counterattack, which never came. There was another, probably more important matter on his mind. He thought that the British would soon recognize the futility of warring against him. He believed that Churchill’s days as leader were numbered, that the British would soon turn away from Churchill and respond to a peace offer from him. On 21 May he told General Franz Halder, “We are seeking contact with England on the basis of a division of the world.” The English would see the light, sooner rather than later. He, Hitler, was astride a great wave, representing the Present and perhaps the Future. Churchill was struggling on the shore, representing an antiquated and useless Past. Hitler also thought that he had the trust and faith of the vast majority of Germans, more than Churchill could count on among the British. Was he altogether wrong? Yes and no. No, because this was how things seemed, and while what happens may not be identical with what people think happens in the long run, the two are inseparable in the short run. Yes, because the majority of the British people refused to recognize how close Hitler had come to an ultimate triumph and how close they had come to their ultimate defeat. But their martial spirit was not unwavering, and they were not — yet—annealed to Churchill.
In a secret memorandum to the War Cabinet, Robert Boothby (a Conservative MP and a Churchillian) wrote on 20 March that Hitler’s Germans represented “the incredible conception of a movement— young, virile, dynamic, and violent—which is advancing irresistibly to overthrow a decaying old world, that we must continually bear in mind; for it is the main source of the Nazi strength and power.”13 On the very day that the real war broke out in the West, Chamberlain wrote in his diary that Joseph Kennedy (the defeatist American ambassador) told him that he didn’t see how Britain could carry on without the French: “I told him I did not see how we could either.”14 On 15 May Lieutenant General Henry Pownall wrote in his diary, sizing up what had happened to the French at the Meuse and Sedan. “Three armies to withdraw because of the initiative shown by one German battalion commander.”15 On 17 May the Ministry of Information suggested to the War Cabinet that “more should be done to inform the general public of the seriousness of the situation, about which most people [are] in complete ignorance.”16 Most people, perhaps, but not all of them. On 14-15 May a quarter of a million queued up at the local police stations to enroll in the Local Defense Volunteers, soon to be renamed the Home Guard. But on 17 May the society photographer Cecil Beaton, on his way to America, wrote in his diary, “My own private courage was badly bruised, and each person one spoke to was more depressing than the last. … A mood of panic was gripping upperclass circles.”17 General Sir Edmund Ironside, chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote in his diary on the same day, “At the moment it looks like the greatest military disaster in all history.”18
On the eighteenth, Sir Samuel Hoare wrote in his diary: “Neville completely knocked out. Everything finished. The USA no good. We could never get our army out, nor if we did it would be without any equipment.”19 (This even before the Germans reached the Channel.)
That very day, Churchill, at the end of a dispatch to General Ismay, for the first time raised the possibility of a French surrender: “The Chiefs of Staff must consider whether it would not be well to send only half the so-called Armoured Division to France. One must always be prepared for the fact that the French may be offered very advantageous terms of peace, and the whole weight be thrown on us.”20 On 19 May, returning from the cabinet and walking “the ugly staircase of the War Office to [his] room, General Ironside told Anthony Eden: ‘This is the end of the British Empire.’ He spoke the words flatly and as a mere statement of military fact. He did not believe that we could hold out alone for more than a few months.”21
On 19 May Oliver Harvey wrote in his diary, “Defeatism in London among the richer classes.”22 On the same day Chamberlain in his diary: “The scene … darken[s] every hour.” A day later: “Nothing to relieve anxiety.” On the twenty-first: the situation is “desperate.” On the twenty-third: “another bleak day.” The French “had done nothing,” their generals were “beneath contempt,” and their soldiers, “with some exceptions, … would not fight and not even march.”23
At night on the twenty-first, Churchill’s new secretary, John Colville: “Dined at Betty Montagu’s flat… and tried unsuccessfully not to talk about the war. … It is clear that the full horror of the situation is dawning on people.”24 On 22 May Charles Waterhouse, a Conservative MP, no friend of Churchill’s, wrote in his diary, “‘All is lost’ sort of attitude in evidence in many quarters.”25
“Many quarters” may be too vague and—perhaps — exaggerated. “All is lost”: that kind of defeatism was not discernible, at least not among the mass of the people. Note, too, that these were the days (the twenty-first to the twenty-fourth, Tuesday to Friday) when both the press and the government expected the French-British counteroffensive at Arras-Amiens against the Bulge (an expectation also propelled by false news); when there came the news of the change of the French high command, the sacking of General Maurice Gamelin and his replacement by General Maxime Weygand, from whom much was expected; when Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk were still in Allied hands, indeed the first two filled by units shipped to them from England. Yet cracks were appearing in morale, and the incompetence of the War Office was becoming fatefully evident. The Germans began their siege of Boulogne on the twenty-second. The arms ordered by the War Office, shipped mostly in the large vessel City of Christchurch, were badly packed and often unusable. “At 9 P.M. the ship’s crew and the stevedores refused to continue [the unloading] owing to the visit of the Luftwaffe.” An officer “even had to place some of the crew under guard.”26 Meanwhile, two elite British units, the First Battallion of the Queen Victoria Rifles and the Rifle Brigade (the Green Jackets), were shipped to Calais on the twenty-second and twenty-third, put under the command of Brigadier Claude Nicholson, a brave officer who was to die in German captivity. As Airey Neave (a Churchillian) wrote: ‘Whatever may be said of the ultimate merit of Churchill’s decision to hold Calais ‘to the death,’ the manner in which [these regiments] were hastily dispatched to France was shameful.… [In their story] farce and tragedy are intimately combined.… Their orders were depressingly obscure and they had no idea what to expect on arrival at Calais.” There, too, on 23 May, stevedores refused to work when the German shells began to fall; a Rifle Brigade officer had to find and force them out from “various holes and corners.”27
During these crucial days the conduct of the command in London, that is, the management of the war by the War Office, beggars belief, marked as it was by lassitude, incompetence, and confusion.
During these days Churchill’s position was not—yet—shaken. Perhaps the habitual slowness of British minds contributed to that; perhaps — and this is more likely—there seemed to be as yet no alternative to him, no spokesman for a course other than his. Still, the record of his past—his mistakes, the oddity of his character — was a burden, even though he did not see it that way. Nonetheless we must sum up some of its ingredients, together with some of the evidences of the distrust with which many of his own party saw him during these rapidly darkening days and nights.
“Although he was an aristocrat by birth, Churchill was widely believed to be not really a gentleman at all. On the contrary, he was often described as a highly gifted, but undeniable, ‘cad.’” He was “widely distrusted as a man of unstable temperament, unsound judgment, and rhetorical (and also alcoholic) excess.… For most of his career, there hung around him an unsavoury air of disreputability and unseemliness, as a particularly wayward, roodess and anachronistic product of a decaying and increasingly discredited aristocratic order. Before 1940, it was not easy for him to be taken seriously as the man of destiny he believed himself to be, when so many people in the know regarded him as little better than an ungentlemanly, almost déclassé, adventurer.” During the interwar years he remained “a shameless cadger and incorrigible scrounger.” “[His] friends were almost invariably drawn from [a] raffish world.” “By the mid -1930S … [he] had become almost a parody of the paranoid aristocrat: intransigent, embittered, apocalyptic, ‘a reactionary of the deepest dye.’ “28 These generalizations by David Cannadine have the mark of a heavy pen; they are somewhat exaggerated, but they are not without substance. Perhaps more balanced, but not essentially different, are the summary sentences by Andrew Roberts. “The national saviour image of Winston Churchill in 1940 is so deeply ingrained into the British psyche as to make any criticism of his conduct during that year sound almost blasphemous. At the outset of that annus mirabilis, however, he was not considered the splendid personification of British glory he was to become later on. Rather he was seen by many in society and in the Conservative Party as a political turncoat, a dangerous adventurer.” At best he was a “delightful rogue who lacked political judgment,” at worst “unscrupulous, unreliable, and unattractively ambitious.” Churchill’s wit and oratorical ability were not enough to overcome severe doubts about his judgment.”29 Besides, some of his enemies often referred to him as a “half-breed” (his mother having been American, and a woman with more than one past) or a “mongrel.”
Much of this would change in 1940. But not immediately. It is of course not our task here to describe or analyze the ups and downs in the long history of Winston Churchill’s reputation. But we must be concerned with him during the fateful fortnight of 10 to 24 May. On 10 May the king evidently preferred Halifax, with whom he and the queen (who disliked Churchill) had had very good private relations. (They had dined together on occasion; Halifax also had the key to the palace garden.) There was, too, an “almost universal expectation that Churchill’s ministry was going to be short-lived.”30 “Almost universal” may be too much, but, again, it was not without serious substance. Many, perhaps most, of the Conservative MPs distrusted Churchill. They cheered Chamberlain and sat on their hands when Churchill first appeared in the House of Commons as prime minister. Churchill noticed and remembered this (David Lloyd George thought that Churchill was afraid of Chamberlain). During the Black Fortnight these opponents of Churchill had few reasons to change their minds. Now the talkative warmonger had his chance. And what had he brought about, as so often in his mercurial past? Nothing but disaster after disaster—in spite of the artifice of his rhetoric, in spite of his habitual declarations, and not only in spite of but because of his habitual trust in the French.
The words “crooks,” “gangsters,” and “wild men” appear in many of the diaries and letters of the period, referring to Churchill’s new government. Among the papers of reputable members of the establishment and the government, those of Lord Hankey, who was still chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, are illustrative.31 On 10 May Hankey wrote to his son: “The net result of it all is that today, when the greatest battle of the war and probably the greatest battle of our history has begun, when the fate of the whole Empire is at stake, we are to have a Government of politicians, … quite a number of whom are perfectly futile people.” To Samuel Hoare two days later: “God help the country … which commits its existence to the hands of a dictator whose past achievements, even though inspired by a certain amount of imagination, have never achieved success! … An untried and wholly inexperienced politician.… The only hope lies in the solid core of Churchill, Chamberlain and Halifax, but whether the wise old elephants will ever be able to hold the Rogue Elephant, I doubt.” Hoare answered on 14 May: “Are you and I partners in adversity? I do not know!” Chamberlain, who (unlike Halifax) refrained from criticizing Churchill, was critical of Churchill’s “method of government making,” though only in his diary and in his letters to his sister. Among the military chiefs, Lieutenant General Henry Pownall made scathing comments in his diary. On 30 April, before the change of government, he charged: “Great as are [Churchill’s] uses he is also a real danger, always tempted by the objective, never counting his resources to see if the objective is attainable. And he is unlucky. He was throughout the last war; and that is a real thing and a bad and dangerous failing.” On 20 May, about a move toward Amiens: “a scandalous (i.e. Winstonized) plan.” On 24 May: “Here are Winston’s plans again. Can nobody prevent his trying to conduct operations himself as a super Commander-in-Chief? How does he think we are to collect eight divisions and attack as he suggests. He can have no conception of our situation and conditions. How is an attack like this to be staged involving three nationalities at an hour’s notice? [This was an unfair analysis of the then situation.] The man is mad.”32
Yet those who were now working close to Churchill began to appreciate some of his qualities. A telling example is John Colville’s diary entries, for two reasons. One is the gradual and apparently genuine conversion of a young upper-class person and civil servant from a distrust of to a respect for Churchill; the other is that the Colville diary (including his fine handwriting) is a period piece, surely of May 1940. On 9 May: “Wagered … a champagne dinner that Mr. C. [Chamberlain] would still be Prime Minister by the end of the month.… Dined with Mrs Henley and went on afterwards to dance at the Savoy. … I thought … the Churchill girl [Mary] rather supercilious.… The Savoy was stuffy and I felt jaded, devitalized and utterly uninteresting.” Next morning (a radiant morning, and Hitler’s D-Day) : “Rode at Richmond in summer heat. As I dismounted the groom told me that Holland and Belgium had been invaded. Nothing can stop [Churchill] having his way — because of his powers of blackmail.… Rab [R. A. Butler, who hated Churchill] said that the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history … this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble … “33 On 13 May: “Went down to the House to hear the new Prime Minister.… He made a brilliant little [little?] speech.” But also: “I spent the day in a bright blue suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors, cheap and sensational-looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.” Three days later some respect for Churchill is already discernible in Colville’s diary, though, deciphering Churchill’s telegram to the Cabinet from Paris (including phrases such as “the mortal gravity of the hour”), Colville still records the remarks of two other secretaries: “He is still thinking of his books” and “his blasted rhetoric.” And by 18 May a certain admiration appears: “Winston, who is full of fight and thrives on crisis and adversity…” Colville has also begun to have an appreciation of Churchill’s carefulness: “Such is the change that high office can work in a man’s inherent love of rash and spectacular action.”34
On 19 May Churchill first broadcast to the people through the BBC. It was a good speech, but it included a fateful sentence: “For myself, I have invincible confidence in the French army and its leaders.” This was not true. His confidence in the French army, far from being “invincible,” was in fact running out. He had already begun to contemplate that the French might give up fighting altogether. During the next seven days he tried to pursue two parallel courses of action which, in the end, proved contradictory. One was essentially continental, the other essentially maritime. One was to urge a French-British counteroffensive aimed at the German Bulge, or Snout, the other to prepare the withdrawal of the entire British army from the Continent. One meant sending yet more troops to Boulogne and Calais, but only for the other purpose, to slow down the German advance toward the last evacuation port of Dunkirk. Churchill flew over to Paris again and seems to have returned in good spirits. But late in the morning of the twenty-third, Monday, he told the War Cabinet: “The whole success of the plan agreed with the French depended on the French forces taking the offensive. At present they showed no signs of doing that. … If General Weygand’s plan succeeded” — and we know now that Weygand never had such a plan35 — “it would mean the release of 35 Allied divisions from their present serious predicament. If it failed, it would be necessary to make a fresh plan with the object of saving and bringing back to this country as many of our best troops and weapons with as little loss as possible.”36 With as little loss as possible. Churchill knew that that was almost impossible. His household diary records that he then returned to his quarters in Admiralty House for lunch and that dinner on 23 May was short. Later, after dinner, he went to Buckingham Palace to see the king. At half past ten he told the king that if the French plan failed, he would have to order the BEF back to England. “This operation would mean the loss of all guns, tanks, ammunition, and all stores in France” the king recorded in his diary. “The question was whether we could get the troops back from Calais and Dunkirk. The very thought of having to order this movement is appalling, as the loss of life will probably be immense.”37
Such was the situation when night fell on Thursday, 23 May 1940. At least one-quarter of a million British troops were trapped by the Germans. They were retreating rather than making a stand, still not putting up much fight against the probing advance of their enemies. Boulogne had fallen, and Calais was beginning to be surrounded by the Germans. Meanwhile, General Heinz Wilhelm Guderian was approaching Dunkirk from the south; other German generals were leaning against the retreating BEF from the east. There were not many British troops left to the south, in the rest of France, and not much of an army in Britain itself.
The British people knew some of this but not much. The tone of the BBC was well mannered and somber, not providing misleading or inaccurate news, but also not suggesting what the Germans’ surrounding of the quarter million meant. The newspapers’ reporting was generally inaccurate: they gave the impression of a great historic battle in northern France, with little indication of what the portents might be. But in May 1940 the radio and the press did not quite reflect or form what the British people were thinking. And we must turn to other sources and attempt to reconstruct something of the thinking and the mood of the people, no matter how incomplete such a reconstruction must necessarily be. The reason for this is that by 1940 the world, or at least the Western world, had entered the democratic age. “Opinion,” Pascal had written three hundred years before, “is the queen of the world.” But unlike three hundred years earlier, now the opinion (or, more precisely, the thinking) of majorities mattered. Hitler knew this. He knew that he had the overwhelming majority of the German people behind him. What mattered was whether the great majority of the British people were really behind Churchill. And, if so, for how long?
Churchill crossing Horse Guards Parade on 20 May: “On 19 May Churchill first broadcast to the people through the BBC. It was a good speech, but it included a fateful sentence: Tor myself, I have invincible confidence in the French army and its leaders.’ This was not true…”
Before we attempt this necessarily incomplete sketch of this important matter, we must keep two conditions in mind. One is the seldom recognized difference between public opinion and popular sentiment. Briefly put: that which is public is not necessarily popular, and opinion is not necessarily the same thing as sentiment. There are many examples in history, and not the least in the history of democracies, when public opinion and popular sentiment are not only different but often diverge.38 In the nineteenth century, public opinion was the opinion of the middle and upper classes, not of the lower, or working, class, even though working-class people gradually became newspaper readers and voters. Much of this class distinction was still evident in Britain in 1940, although fortuitously it proved not to be decisive. But it did exist, and we have now seen some of its evidences — for example, the “panic” that seemed to have gripped some people in the upper classes on 18-19 May. Yet nothing of that had filtered down into the newspapers, and the great majority of people were unaware of it. What it signifies is that, here and there, some people (mostly in London) became suddenly aware of the seeming hopelessness of the situation.
Another group of people among whom evidences of defeatism existed in mid-May were intellectuals. “The artist” Ezra Pound once wrote, “is the antennae of the race” But in 1940 this was not so. Cyril Connolly, not a defeatist (he started his Horizon in January 1940), feared that in the event of German bombing the people would panic (George Orwell told him that he did not agree). In the surviving writings and reminiscences of writers the record about May 1940 is confusing and mixed. In Put Out More Flags (written in 1942), Evelyn Waugh wrote of “that odd, dead period before the Churchillian renaissance.” (The book ends in June 1940: “There’s a new spirit abroad.… I see it on every side.”)39 Ten years later, in Men at Arms, there is not one glimmer of a Churchillian renaissance; indeed, Waugh said that he abhorred Churchill and his rhetoric, as did Malcolm Muggeridge (but he, too, only well after the war). There is no Churchillian renaissance, indeed, nothing of May 1940, in Anthony Powell’s Valley of Bones, the seventh novel in his Dance to the Music of Time, which is set during the first half of 1940. Careful readers may detect a suggestive element in Kenneth Clark’s autobiographical Another Part of the Wood: A Self Portrait (1974). Clark was not a typical intellectual but, rather, a knowledgeable and well-situated figure within the upper reaches of the establishment. Elegant and sleek, he was for years rather close to Chamberlain. In these memoirs, decades after the war, he writes sympathetically but critically of Chamberlain: “I was in fact unequivocally on the side of Mr. Churchill.40 Unequivocally? Not—yet—in May 1940.
The other distinction that we must keep in mind is the one between understanding and knowing. To invoke Pascal again: “We understand more than we know.” According to logic, understanding is not only the result of knowledge; it necessarily follows knowledge. Yet there are myriad instances and examples when understanding precedes knowledge, indeed, when it leads to knowledge. Allow me, then, to essay this generalization: in May 1940 most British men and women understood some things that they did not yet know. Or they understood some things that they did not wish to think about, even as they were capable of thinking about them (a very British inclination). We shall, I hope, give some illustrations of this in the following pages, indeed, throughout this book.41
There exist numerous books and diaries and reminiscences of people and writers about the late summer of 1940 and the Blitz, but not very many about May 1940. One exception is The Oaken Heart, by the detective-story writer Margery Allingham. The book is a kind of diary, reproduced (and perhaps edited here and there) for her American friends, about “Auburn,” the village in Essex where she lived. Since a fair amount of it was written during the Black Fortnight in May 1940, it may be worth citing parts of it here in some detail.42 On 14 or 15 May Allingham heard Queen Wilhelmina speaking on the BBC: “Showed us country people that she was a proper Queen, … [but] she brought something else right home to many of us. Courage was not going to be enough. For the first time probably in all our history we were not going to get by, this time, with just courage and the improvisation it brings with it.” On Sunday morning (most probably 19 May), Allingham talks with a former corporal of the First World War: “That was the first time I ever heard anyone in the country question the reliability of the French, although some informed circles [in London] had been whispering about it uneasily for months. Mr Parker said he only hoped that there was some sort of a trap waiting somewhere, and that in the past we had permitted dangerous advances for that very purpose.” On 20 May: “The method of the German advance fascinated everybody. In the next few days it was discussed exhaustively by everyone who came in and who we met in the square.” Also: “The Captain admired the enemy efficiency from a purely professional point of view. You had to hand it to that feller Hitler, he said, He knew how to get a move on.”43 Unlike during the First World War, there was now the prospect of invasion.
The next morning we were still not invaded. Still no German soldiers, with or without disguise, had dropped out of the sky, and I could not help hoping with Norry, who insisted “all this will pass” as if it were a stone or a tree, that it would never come. However, we knew it was criminal just to hope. Already the cry “wishful thinking” was being thrown at us bitterly as if we had originated the sin and we were inclined to resent it. (There is a tendency to take everything very personally in Auburn.) We had never been optimists about anything and had been called “defeatists” in our times.
Meanwhile the news was growing rapidly frightful.… We were told not to use the telephone if we could help it and we felt cut off and very ignorant.
“Meanwhile, round about this time, maybe a day or so later, odd news was beginning to creep in from Flinthannock and all along the coast. Unexpected people mentioned it, many of whom did not at first see its terrifying significance. The Government were collecting little boats and men to man them. What for? Things were as bad as that, were they?” She continues: “What a sporting chance, though! What a move! How like old Churchill! How tragically makeshift, but how traditional!”44
In addition to such personal recollections, there exists another, rather valuable fund of sources of evidences of public opinion and popular sentiment in Britain at that time. These are the files of “Mass-Observation,” or M-O, as it came to be known, preserved in the archives of the University of Sussex.45 In the United States a milestone in the history of public opinion research was the establishment of the Gallup Institute in Princeton in 1935. Two years later two enterprising Englishmen, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson (“who had come into ‘people-watching’ via his interest in bird-watching and natural history”: Dorothy Sheridan), created M-O. They “began to recruit a nationwide panel of Observers to participate in a study of everyday life,” mostly for commercial purposes, but in 1938 they expanded their scope to politics and war. In May 1940 they began to transmit materials and even give recommendations to the Ministry of Information. Unlike Gallup and other Americans engaged in public opinion research, they made no pretense to anything “scientific” and did not attempt to quantify all their data. That is exactly where the value of these materials resides. They are first-hand reports, typed by intelligent, commonsensical, mostly middle-class observers, many of them women volunteers. Even these many years later, their summaries breathe with the presence of authenticity and genuine concern.46
London householders, take the pictures off the walls, store our valuables in the basement, put buckets of sand in the passages, keep the bath filled with water, and make similar preparations.… This done, visit the hairdresser, deciding that if I must be bombed, I may as well be bombed with neatly arranged hair” (England’s Hour, 30–31).
Here, for example, are items from the closely typed, one-page summary of 16 May (FR 124, C 7, nine long paragraphs) :
Exceptionally intensive investigation had been made today on the impact of latest news from Belgium and France.…
People have become distinctly more worried today. A proportion are now feeling desperate, though this does not mean that they think we shall not win in the end. A feeling of Hitler’s superiority grows.…
Deeply concerned people are keeping up a good deal of optimism today, though all observers agree in finding that face and tone often belie the words.…
People haven’t begun to consider that we might be actually beaten. It just hasn’t occurred to most people that we can be beaten. The old complacency has been shaken, but it persists. If suddenly shattered, there will be a morale explosion.
Women are much more worried than men, and some are now showing definite terror of the immediate future. They are much more bewildered than men, and many are unable to grasp what is happening at all, especially working-class.
On 19 May “there is an improvement in tone today. Especially in London, but not in Lancashire.”47 “People remain confident that we will win in the long run, but today still shows plenty of implicit or unconscious defeatism, and a few open references to German victory.”
“A feeling of grave seriousness remains …” Admiralty Arch was fortified to defend Whitehall against attack by German parachutists landing in Trafalgar Square; beyond the Arch are the Admiralty and St. James’s Park.
That night — 19 May—Churchill first broadcast to the people of Britain. The general reaction was favorable, mostly because of his straightforward phrases about the gravity of the situation. On 20 May M-O “observers report that tension is slightly relieved today, … slightly less gloom, slightly more detachment about people’s attitude to the news.… A feeling of grave seriousness remains, if anything emphasized by Churchill’s broadcast.… Women conspicuously more worried than men today. General feeling is that we should pull through, just.” On 21 May a very discerning observer reports: “There is still no one view which can with any justice be labelled ‘public opinion’ — it is too varied and unformed. The most certain thing remains the belief that Britain will triumph eventually.”
“Women remain, as usual, more pessimistic and less optimistic than men.”
Next day, “unexpectedly,” investigations “report that morale is down, or rather that anxiety is up.”
Women are in a particularly depressed condition, and today for the first time, some are openly showing it.… On the other hand, many men and some women still feel confident that the situation is not really as bad as supposed, and comparisons with the last war are often brought up.
The fear that a Nazi invasion is possible is now beginning to appear.
The bewilderment and distress is more severe today than ever before, and the disillusion about all our past confidence and proud leadership is becoming a major strain on ordinary simple minds.
In Bolton people are much more calm than in London. Three investigators there made the following pertinent comment on this morning’s detailed investigations: “The public is deliberately burying its head in the sands. This attitude is more common among the women.” Londoners are more pessimistic.
“The result of the speeches given in the last few days by Churchill and Duff Cooper … is to engender a feeling of relief, not because the situation is not serious, but because the people feel they know the worst, which is a new experience for them.”
It may be of some interest that many of the observers write about “feeling” rather than “thinking” (customary in English, of course, but perhaps worth noticing, given the overlap but still existing difference between opinions and sentiments). Thus, on 23 May, “a noticeable increase in cheerfulness and general calm, a distinct decrease in pessimism and extreme nervousness … for the time being. The intense gloom which affected many in London yesterday, mainly among the middle-classes, but also some of the working-classes, is not conspicuous today.”
“The feeling that a big effort is going to be required and that our leaders are capable of asking for it … is growing. The feeling had a big value in liberating people from the general feeling of apathy, inactivity, and ineffectiveness which seriously depressed and worried a large number.… This new feeling is frequently reflected in verbatim material today, comments like ‘We’ll soon be doing something.’ ‘I’m prepared to do anything.’ ‘Well, everyone’s in it now.’”
Nearly sixty years later a historian may attempt to sum up two general impressions. One is that on 23 May the majority of the British people did not know how catastrophic the situation of their army was. The other is that their confidence in Churchill was something of a new element, beginning to have something of an effect. Still, there can hardly be a better summation than the last sentence of the “Morale Today” report of 19 May: “‘Outwardly calm, inwardly anxious’ covers the general tone of today.”
