Hitler’s halt order. – The Germans before Dunkirk. – Calais. – Hitler and the Conservatives. – The two Rights. – Chamberlain. – Appeasers. – Halifax. – The War Cabinet. – Churchill and Roosevelt.– The Bntish press. – “A slight increase in anxiety and a slight decrease in optimism.”
Early on the morning of 24 May Hitler left his headquarters on the edge of Germany and flew to see General Karl Rundstedt at Charleville on the western bank of the Meuse. This was unusual, since it was Hitler’s custom to retire late and to rise late (it seems that the last time he had got up early was on 3 September 1939, the day of the British and French declarations of war on Germany). What he wanted to discuss with Rundstedt was obviously important. It involved the rapid progress of the German armies encircling the Allied army in Flanders and Belgium, pushing the latter to the remaining ports on the Channel, where Boulogne had already fallen, where the siege of Calais was about to begin, and where General Guderian’s armored troops were but fifteen miles to the south of Dunkirk, having crossed their widest obstacle, the Aa Canal, in two places. But there were dangers to consider: Guderian may have advanced too quickly. About this Hitler and Rundstedt seemed to agree. At 11:42 that morning the order went out: Guderian’s advance must be temporarily halted.
There is a fair amount of literature (and speculation) about the sources (rather than about the consequences) of Hitler’s halt order. Hitler’s motives and purposes were not simple. We must attempt to sum them up — or, rather, to sort them out. On one level (if that is the proper phrase) of his mind he was concerned about the wear and tear on the German armored vehicles, in continuous movement and skirmishing for a fortnight now: this concern accorded with those of Rundstedt, who had made an account of such losses the night before. Perhaps this concern was also buttressed by Hitler’s memories of the First World War, when he had served four long years in a land crisscrossed by watercourses and canals and where large armies attempted offensives mired in the mud. More evident, and documentable, are Hitler’s nervous worries at the time. He still feared the possibility of an Allied counteroffensive maiming the snout of the advancing German crocodile. In sum, he did not — yet — believe his luck.
There was another element in his mind. Any historian worth his salt knows how to eschew monocausal explanations of human events — that is, the attribution of a single motive to any given decision.1 And there is another necessary distinction, the one between motives and purposes (the first a push of the past, the second the pull of the future), for rare are also those instances when the purposes of a decision are singular or exclusive. This applies to Adolf Hitler, too, who was secretive and whose mind was not simple. It is at least possible that he wished not to annihilate the entire British Expeditionary Force. “Not to annihilate” is perhaps the phrase that comes closest to the truth, or, rather, to the workings of his mind. There are not a few instances, in war as in politics, when it is to the victor’s advantage to let—or to force — his opponents to make a narrow escape, for otherwise, having burned their bridges, they may fight to the very end, with all kinds of unforeseeable consequences. That almost surely was in Hitler’s mind. But he would soon in retrospect exaggerate his purposes. “Bridge” — indeed, “golden bridge” — are the words some Germans have used to explain Hitler’s decision to halt before Dunkirk. These include Rundstedt, whose reminiscences do, however, have elements of special pleading. After the war Churchill, in his War Memoirs, took good care to ignore speculations about golden bridges; he attributed the halt order to Rundstedt’s hesitations rather than to Hitler’s. Churchill was not altogether incorrect: “golden bridge” was an overstatement, to say the least. But an overstatement, while wanting in precision, is not necessarily altogether devoid of truth. Other people in Hitler’s circle heard him say, “The Führer wants to spare the British a humiliating defeat.”2 After Dunkirk came Hitler’s rationalization: “The army is England’s backbone. … If we destroy it, there goes the British Empire. We would not, or could not, inherit it.… My generals did not understand this.”3 And near the end of the war, in February 1945: “Churchill was quite unable to appreciate the sporting spirit of which I have given proof by refraining from creating an irreparable breach between the British and ourselves. We did, however, refrain from annihilating them at Dunkirk.”4
Hitler’s purposes were mixed. He wanted the British army to leave Europe. But by “not annihilating” the BEF, he did not wish to spare them. Three days before the halt order he let himself be convinced by Hermann Goering that the retreating BEF could be smashed to pieces by the Luftwaffe. On 23 May Major Engel, Hitler’s adjutant, noted in his diary that Hitler and Goering were talking on the telephone again: “The Field Marshal thinks that the great task of the Luftwaffe is beginning: the annihilation of the British in Northern France. The army will only have to occupy. We are angry. The Führer is inspired.”5 Another diary entry of 23 May, this one by the canny Ernst von Weizsaecker, undersecretary of state: “Whether the English give in now or whether we make them peace-loving through bombing…” Well, the bombing did not work. The halt order was crucial: “Dunkirk is to be left to the Luftwaffe. Should the capture of Calais prove difficult, this port too is to be left to the Luftwaffe.”
Hitler’s halt order was sent in clear.6 It was instantly read in London. (It was brought to the command in the War Office by General A. E. Percival, assistant chief of defence of the general staff—the unfortunate man who, less than two years later, would be the feeble defender of Singapore, surrendering it to the Japanese: the most shameful defeat of British arms in an entire century.) Neither the War Office nor Churchill nor Lord Gort, the commander of the BEF, recognized its immediate importance.7 The confusion in the War Office was great and deep. They were preoccupied with the situation at Calais. Boulogne had capitulated to the Germans the night before. At 2 A.M. an order was sent to Calais: “evacuation was decided in principle.” The siege of Calais was about to begin; in the morning the first German artillery shells began to pepper the port. Two large British ships, loaded with British troops, cast off from Calais for Dover. The Germans could see this with their own eyes. The British were leaving the Continent. This may have contributed to Hitler’s halt order. A few minutes before the halt order, Brigadier Claude Nicholson, the British commander at Calais, told the War Office by telephone that evacuation would continue. He expected it to be completed some time the next day. Somewhat later the War Office countermanded the evacuation plan: Calais was to be held as long as possible. Often through that afternoon British and French troops, marching to vessels at the port, were turned around with orders to stay in Calais. The confusion at the War Office was worse than what was happening in Calais. Earlier that day Churchill had learned of the evacuation order. He minuted to General Ismay: “This is surely madness. The only effect of evacuating Calais would be to transfer the forces now blocking it to Dunkirk. Calais must be held for many reasons, but especially to hold the enemy, on its front.”8 By noon Churchill’s impetuosity got the better of him. Again he sent a note to Ismay: “I cannot understand the situation around Calais.… The Germans are blocking all exits.… Yet I expect [the German] forces achieving this are very modest. Why then are they not attacked? Why does not Lord Gort attack them from the rear at the same time that we make a sortie from Calais?” This seemed logical to Churchill: another, smaller version of a two-pronged attack, cutting off the German snout. In reality, it made no sense at all.9 As Airey Neave, who had fought and was wounded and captured at Calais (and who later escaped from a German prison camp), afterward put it, “Churchill’s admonition to Gort to attack the Tenth Panzer Division when the B.E.F. was separated from Calais by at least four Panzer Divisions … [is] evidence of the terrifying ignorance of those conducting this campaign from Whitehall.”10 There was another reason to hold on to Calais. The French pressed the British to stay on, not to evacuate. Indeed it may have seemed to the French that the British were packing up, leaving them in the lurch. Churchill was sufficiently appreciative of this, because of its political—and human — implications. General Weygand had ordered to maintain a large connected bridgehead: the ports “can be held for a long time.” That was an unreasonable exaggeration. Yet Calais did hold out till the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, and that made a difference. Had Calais not been defended, two other German divisions would have joined Guderian pushing northward. He was already on the north side of the Aa Canal before Dunkirk; on the twenty-fourth there were only a small British corps and a few French units between him and Dunkirk. “Had this happened,” Neave later wrote, “there would have been no need for Hitler’s intervention which lost Guderian the historic chance of winning the Second World War almost in a morning.”11 The italics are mine. There may be some imprecision — imprecision, rather than exaggeration — in Neave’s statement: but not much.12
There was now, at least temporarily, a difference between the War Office and Churchill. The command in London wished to save the British units in Calais. They therefore still would have preferred evacuation, while Churchill wanted to fight on in Calais till the end — partly, as we have seen, because of its effects on the French, but also partly because, as he properly recognized, it would slow down the German advance to the last port, Dunkirk. The War Office was constrained to agree with Churchill, though with some reluctance. This appears from the telegram that the War Office sent to Brigadier Nicholson late (at 11:23 P.M.) on 24 May: “In spite of policy of evacuation given you this morning fact that British forces in your area now under Fagalde [General Fagalde was a courageous French commander in the Calais area] who has ordered no repeat no evacuation means that you comply for the sake of Allied solidarity.” When Churchill read this early next morning, he was furious. He sent a message to General Ironside: “Pray find out who was the officer responsible for sending the order to evacuate Calais yesterday and by whom this very lukewarm telegram I saw this morning was drafted in which mention is made of ‘for the sake of Allied Solidarity.’ This is no way to encourage men to fight to the end. Are you sure there is no streak of defeatist opinion in General Staff?” There was at least a small streak of defeatist opinion in Ironside, to whom this fast minute was directed. Even though there were no signs of defeatism among the officers and soldiers of the British units under Gort (still well to the east of Dunkirk, retreating slowly westward), signs of defeatism were apparent in the Belgian army, where some of the Flemish soldiers were unwilling to fight Germans. In any event, when Churchill read the “lukewarm telegram” early on the morning of the twenty-fifth, the swastika flag was already flying on the Hôtel de Ville in Calais. Around the port and the maritime quays Nicholson and Fagalde held out, for another day and a half.
This is not a military history of May 1940. But it is not reasonable or even possible to separate the unfolding of the military from the political sequence of events. Nor is it at all reasonable to separate Hitler’s military purposes from his political ones. Their essences were the same: to convince the British not to oppose him, certainly not in Europe. Were they to leave the Continent, all to the good; he might have to force them to do that; but they ought not be dead set to fight him at any cost. Now there was Churchill; but he was not “the British.”
This is not the place to attempt a detailed analysis of Hitler’s understanding of the British. He had a certain respect for their Empire and also for their soldierly abilities (especially because of what he had seen during the First World War). He knew something, but not much, about their history. He did not really understand the common people of Britain or elements of their character. But as the war proceeded, his respect for the British faded fast. He began to deprecate their fighting abilities, and toward the end of the war he turned on them with a furious hatred — his rocket firings at London and many of his statements are evidences of that. He blamed the British for having chosen to oppose him and thus, like the Poles, having precipitated the war.
But this was May 1940. What he saw then (and he had agreed with Joseph Goebbels when the latter had said something like this in April) was that this was but a repetition, on a larger scale, of the struggle that he had fought and won in Germany, which had brought him to power. He and his National Socialists were bound to win the struggle, even though they had started out as a minority, because they and their ideas were more determined and stronger than those of their opponents. That during the street fighting in Weimar Germany a National Socialist trooper was worth two or three of his Communist or Socialist opponents was a consequence of that. During the war Hitler believed that, much in the same way, one German soldier was worth two or three Polish or French or perhaps even British soldiers, not only because of superior German discipline and equipment but also because a German soldier of the Third Reich incarnated a national ideology that was better and stronger than those of his enemies. And thus 80 million Germans were more than a match for their nearly 100 million Western European opponents, with all their many empires behind them. There was some truth in this but not enough. In the end 80 million Germans, tough match as they were, were not enough to withstand the hundreds of millions of Russians and Americans and British and others pouring over them. But that was not yet so in May 1940.
There was another element in Hitler’s vision about this war being but a larger repetition of his struggle in Germany a decade or so before. There he could not have come to power without the support of the German Conservatives. In 1923 he had attempted a radical nationalist uprising in Munich, challenging the established authorities if need be. It failed, and thereafter he changed his mind or, rather, his tactics. He would come to power with the support of the Conservative parties, of their politicians, of their press, and of the masses of respectable conservative German voters. They would support him not only because they would be impressed with his mass following. They would be inclined to sympathize, at least to some extent, with his nationalism, with his anti-Semitism, and especially with his anti-Communism. Thus he would disarm their opposition; he would gain a certain amount of respectability and their support when needed. They would think that he was dependent on them, that he was their partner; but, once in power, they would be entirely dependent on him, and soon. This was, of course, what happened in Germany in 1933. He had little respect for these people; indeed, he regarded most of them (and on occasion said so) with contempt. A prototypical example of such German Conservatives was Alfred Hugenberg, the Nationalist party leader and press magnate, with whom Hitler made an alliance in 1930 and whom Hitler discarded easily a few months after his assumption of power, having no trouble with the erstwhile Hugenbergers, most of them his followers now.
And then, beginning at the latest in 1935, when his relationship with Britain became very important to him, he met people among the British governing classes, members of the British aristocracy, and the British Conservative Party; he met Halifax, and then Chamberlain, and many others, too, including the old Lloyd George — and again, Hitler saw, or thought he saw, through them, as indeed he had seen through so many opponents and followers during his extraordinary career. He thought that he understood their strengths and their weaknesses, just as he had understood his potential German conservative opponents before 1933. And just as these German Conservatives were unwilling to take a firm stand against Hitler (certainly unwilling to station themselves on the side of liberals, socialists, or other leftists), it was evident that these Britishers were unwilling to consider a war with him, certainly not on the side of the French or of other Europeans. Just as these German Conservatives feared Communism and took comfort in Hitler’s evidently uncompromising anti-Communism and anti-Marxism, so did some of these British Conservatives. Indeed, just as some of these German Conservatives had done, they seemed to be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and to see his New Order as at least an alternative both to Communism and to the decaying and corrupting climate of an antiquated parliamentary liberalism. Hitler did not sufficiently understand that Britons were not Germans — that the patriotism of British Conservatives and the nationalism of German Conservatives were not quite the same things. But when he occasionally called the British appeasers “meine Hugenberger,” my Hugenbergers, he was not entirely wrong.
We have seen that many — probably the majority—of the Conservative members in the House of Commons did not particularly like Churchill and that their reluctance to applaud him was largely due to their uneasiness with his personal and public reputation, with his past. There was, however, more to it than that. These members of Parliament — a huge Conservative majority — were elected in 1935, and in 1935 the policies of the government, the inclinations of their party and what seems to have been those of the majority of the British people, were not what they were in 1940. In 1935 and for some years thereafter, they were willing—more precisely, they were not unwilling — to give the new Germany a measure of credit. Since then at least a dozen books have been written about appeasement. This is not the place to compose another précis of its history. Besides, “appeasement,” as such, was a dead issue in 1940, when Britain and Germany were at war. But the uncertain acceptance —indeed, the lack of enthusiasm for Churchill in May 1940—had much to do with his anti-appeasement record and rhetoric, including his many attacks on Chamberlain’s policy that stopped only in September 1939 —which is why we cannot avoid a short description of the inclinations of Churchill’s former (and in May 1940 still latent) opponents.
The British tendency to appease Germany (the term “appeasement” did not become widely current until later, in 1938) had many sources. They included the gradual recognition of the British people that Germany had been treated unfairly by the Treaty of Versailles and thereafter. There was the almost universal wish of government and people (shared by Labour and pacifists) to avoid a British involvement in another war, especially another war in Europe, at almost any cost. To these wide and popular inclinations was added the willingness of many Conservatives and at least a portion of the upper classes to give some credit to the then-new types of authoritarian governments in Europe, largely owing to their seemingly determined anti-Communism. As Andrew Roberts wrote in his biography of Halifax: “Although today it is considered shameful and craven, the policy of appeasement once occupied almost the whole moral high ground. The word was originally synonymous with idealism, magnanimity of the victor and the willingness to right wrongs.”13 Pragmatism rather than idealism, we might say, and an unwillingness to risk involvement rather than magnanimity, but Roberts is not altogether wrong. He is certainly right in citing Sir Samuel Hoare that in March 1936 there was “a strong pro-German feeling in this country” and that the then prime minister Stanley Baldwin feared war, since that “would probably only result in Germany going Bolshevik.”14 (Churchill and others — both before and well after the war—declared that the last chance to deter Hitler was to move against him when he reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936, as if that would have been an easy thing. They were wrong.)
There exists a photograph of Baldwin and Chamberlain walking together to Parliament in early 1937. Their clothes are black and rumpled; with their stiff high collars, umbrella, and cane, Baldwin topped with a high bowler, Chamberlain with a shiny top hat, they look like surviving incarnations of an entirely outdated Victorianism — as outdated as Hugenberg or Hindenburg or Schacht in 1933 or 1934, when seen (and not only when read), and in contrast to the Hitler of “The Triumph of the Will”; prototypical figures of an old — though not very old — Right.
We must understand that the great conflict of the 1930s, of the period before June 1941 (when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union) and even well after that in many places, was not between Right and Left but, rather, one between two Rights. In one sense, “Right” and “Left” were becoming less and less useful as categories or definitions. Was Hitler to the Right or to the Left of Churchill? Either of these designations would be incorrect. Hitler was a revolutionary and not a traditionalist, but in many ways he superseded these increasingly antiquated categories. More important, for our purposes, was the recognition that throughout the 1930s, especially in Europe, the Left was weak. Except for the Soviet Union, there was no Communist regime anywhere on the globe; except for small minorities and some intellectuals, Communism did not attract masses of people. In Germany the socialist and Communist opposition to Hitler melted away in the sun of his National Socialist successes, and this was not very different from what happened in other nations. In England, too, support for the Labour Party did not really increase even after most Labourites abandoned their more or less traditional pacifism and opposed appeasement. The most principled opponents
“Baldwin [right] and Chamberlain walking together to Parliament in early 1937. Their clothes are black and rumpled; with their stiff high collars, umbrella, and cane, Baldwin topped with a high bowler, Chamberlain with a shiny top hat, they look like surviving incarnations of an entirely outdated Victorianism…”
of Hitler and the Third Reich were traditionalist patriots like Churchill or de Gaulle—and, in Germany, the handful of aristocratic conspirators who finally tried to kill Hitler in 1944. In Britain the real chasm existed between Churchill and his followers on one side and Chamberlain and his followers on the other; in France, between de Gaulle and Pétain; in Italy and in Spain, too, between fascists and royalists. In these as in many other European countries, the main conflict was between Right and Right rather than between Right and Left. (In the United States, too, the most dangerous and popular challengers of Franklin Roosevelt were men of the Right, not of the Left: Huey Long and Father Coughlin.) In one sense, it may be said, the division was between patriots and nationalists, or between traditionalists and pragmatists — but we must not let ourselves get involved in a sump of definitions. Perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that the division was between reactionaries and conservatives; indeed, on many occasions Churchill was criticized as a “hopeless reactionary” or an “extreme rightist,” and not only by Hitlerites or by Communists but by many of the Chamberlain conservatives (which is why I wrote that Chamberlain did represent an old, but not very old, Right). Was Chamberlain to the Right or to the Left of Churchill? Both designations are arguable, but perhaps we should rest with the wisdom of Samuel Johnson, to the effect that “definitions are tricks for pedants.”15
In any event: in the 1930s Neville Chamberlain was prototypical, the leading figure of British conservatism. His reputation was “steady” (very much unlike that of Churchill before 1940). He was steady in his dislike of flamboyance, of intellectualism, of extremism, of irresponsibilities political or fiscal — steady in his narrow but strong vision of the path that Britain must take and follow. He was steady in his abhorrence of war,16 of Communists and leftists, of the Soviet Union, of press propaganda; steady in his unwillingness to become involved in European politics and in his distrust of the French (and of Americans) ; and, consequent to all this, steady in his willingness to grant the Germans, including Hitler, a more than considerable benefit of the doubt. That last inclination may have been fortified by two other elements in his mental makeup, one late Victorian, the other modern. His Midland, nonconformist, Victorian tendency to trust Germans rather than French was not unlike that of his father, the master politician Joseph Chamberlain, who in 1899 had proposed that the world ought to be governed by the Teutonic nations: Britain, America, Germany. More timely, in the 1930s, was Chamberlain’s recognition of the failure of parliamentary-liberal democracy in many countries, though not of course in England. He, as indeed did many others (including Churchill),17 saw the new kind of order established by Mussolini (and, in Chamberlain’s case, even the one by Hitler) as having certain positive features, especially their determined anti-Communism. Chamberlain, unlike Churchill, did not have a quick mind (which is not always a handicap), but this meant that he was unwilling to change his mind about matters even after contrary evidence had begun to accumulate. Chamberlain’s opponents therefore regarded him as small-minded and obstinate; his supporters as steady and stubborn — and for many years there were many more of the latter.
But in 1939 Chamberlain was forced to change his views—because of Hitler. His opponents thought that he was changing his mind too late; his supporters did not think so. We need not concern ourselves with that. But a change of mind does not mean (or, at least, very seldom means) a change in character. He was not made to be a war leader. He was, as Churchill would say at Chamberlain’s funeral in November 1940, “an English worthy,” and so he was in August 1939, when he knew that Britain must keep its word and go to war, however reluctantly. Yet on 23 August 1939 — the day when the news of Hitler’s pact with Stalin had come and the day when Hitler gave the order to set the day for the invasion of Poland — Chamberlain said to the American ambassador Joseph Kennedy, “I have done everything that I can think of and it seems as if all my work has come to naught.” According to Kennedy, Chamberlain was deeply depressed: “[He] says the futility of it all is the thing that is frightful; after all they cannot save the Poles; they can merely carry on a war of revenge that will mean the destruction of the whole of Europe.”18 (Chamberlain also, at least partially, shared Kennedy’s anti-Semitism.)19 There followed the eight months of the Reluctant War. Chamberlain was still prime minister. “The fact that the early stages of the war were ones of inactivity was not merely because there was little that could be done, but in addition because Chamberlain wanted little to be done.”20 That was why Churchill succeeded him, on 10 May, after the debate in the House of Commons when a portion of conservative members had temporarily deserted Chamberlain, though without really conferring their full allegiance on Churchill.
But in addition to supporters of Chamberlain and to the conservative majority in Parliament, there were other influential elements in the ranks of government and society whose dislike of Churchill did not of course vanish entirely in May 1940. Extreme elements — such as the Mosleyites, British Fascists, Germano-maniacs, obsessive anti-Semites, and so on—were without considerable influence, and, as we shall see, by 24 May they were safely put away by the government through the instrument of a draconian regulation about which Chamberlain fully concurred with Churchill. But in Britain (unlike almost anywhere else in Europe), there were many members of the aristocracy who, at least before May 1940, expressed their rather definite sympathies for Hitler — or, at least, for the then Germanophile inclinations of Chamberlain.21 Such tendencies were shared by members of the royal family and, what was more important, by high civil servants of considerable influence.22 One of these was Sir Horace Wilson, who before 1940 was Chamberlain’s closest and most trusted adviser. R. A. Butler, in a letter in 1939, somewhat facetiously referred to Wilson as “the uncrowned ruler of England.” The reminiscences of Kenneth Clark would seem to support Butler’s assessment: “Mr Chamberlain was not an imaginative man and was singularly devoid of ‘antennae.’ Decisions involving these qualities were made for him by an extraordinary character called Sir Horace Wilson. He sat in a small office outside the Prime Minister’s room in Downing Street, and everyone with an appointment had to pass through this office and have a few minutes’ conversation with Sir Horace. … I enjoyed my occasional conversations with him, and said so to Mr Chamberlain. His eyes lit up, he turned to look at me and said: ‘He is the most remarkable man in England. I couldn’t live a day without him.’”23 After 10 May he had to: one of the first things that Churchill did was to tell Horace Wilson to get out.
R. A. Butler was Halifax’s undersecretary at the Foreign Office and, in some ways, Halifax’s Wilson, though Halifax was less dependent on Butler than Chamberlain had been on Wilson. Like Wilson, Butler was a consummate intriguer and wire-puller. He was also rich and a believer in social hierarchy, in a compound of aristocracy mixed with some democracy as being the essence of Britain. One indication of his inclinations may be gathered from his handwritten letter to Chamberlain and Halifax on 18 March 1938, only a few days after Hitler’s invasion and annexation of Austria, recommending an account by E. W. D. Tennant, chairman of the Anglo-German Fellowship: “He is quite discreet and sincere. … I am not telling him that I have shown this to you and Halifax.” Tennant’s “account” (here and there laced with anti-Jewish remarks) accused the hapless Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg of having imposed “brutal cruelties” on the Austrian Nazis. Its essence:
England is still mainly governed by an aristocracy with ancient traditions basically unchanged for centuries. Germany is governed by one comparatively young man risen from low beginnings with no personal experience of other countries and surrounded by advisers of similar type, all men of vital, dynamic energy who have gone through an incredibly hard school, … who are tough, ruthless but immensely able and who believe themselves to be governed by very high ideals. I still believe that it should not only be possible, but easy, to make friends with them.… Hitler is determined as ever by any means, fair or even foul, to prevent Communism overrunning Europe.
To this Butler added: “I think you will find his account remarkably true.”24
Like Horace Wilson, who pulled many kinds of wires (at least in one case literally—he was behind the tapping of Winston Churchill’s telephone conversations in 1938), Butler had a talent for intriguing.
In April 1938 he devised a plan to influence the British press, “aware of the German anger at some [of the British papers].” “What we really want to organize is a little publicity committee for our work in the Foreign Office: … (a) see that our case [of appeasing Germany] is well represented, (b) see that the correspondence columns everywhere are well stacked with arguments written by our friends, (c) see that our speeches are better (as well) heard and known to our opponents’ or semi-opponents’, e.g. Winston’s campaign should be watched.”25 When it came to appeasement, Butler was closer to Chamberlain than to his chief, Halifax; on occasion he even said so. “He took to appeasement with an unholy glee not shared after Anschluss by anyone else in the Foreign Office. His extreme partisanship against members of his own party, his relish for back-room deals and his almost messianic opposition to Churchill make Butler, as even his heavily weeded papers are unable to prevent, seem a thoroughly unattractive figure.”26
Enough of this. During the Black Fortnight neither Wilson nor Butler were dramatis personae. On 11 May 1940 Churchill got rid of Horace Wilson. But he did not, because he could not, get rid of R. A. Butler in Whitehall. This was significant, because Butler was, after all, Halifax’s undersecretary of state, and by 24 May a new alignment had begun to appear in the War Cabinet. Churchill’s principal opponent was not Chamberlain; it was Halifax.
Edward Wood, Lord Halifax, is the subject of an excellent biography by Andrew Roberts — superbly proportioned and composed, with a very impressive variety of sources. Valuable portions of it deal with Halifax’s relations with Chamberlain and with Churchill.27 Since that triangular relationship was crucial to the events of May 1940, we must, at the risk of imprecision, essay a short sketch of Halifax’s character and his career leading up to the Black Fortnight and eventually to his decision to oppose Churchill.
This is not easy. The personality of Halifax was very much unlike that of Churchill, but he was also unlike Chamberlain. His appearance was unusual: very tall, very gaunt and erect, he had a stance marked by his unusually large, splayed feet; he was born without a left hand, the prosthetic substitution for which (a fist) he managed exquisitely, as indeed he wore his unobtrusive but exquisitely cut clothes. His aristocratic appearance accorded well with his character: calm and cool, perhaps even cold; shy rather than sensitive; always in control of his emotions and, perhaps more admirably, of his ambitions. He had a faint (rather than weak) sense of humor, an English quality of which Chamberlain had almost none and Churchill (at least so it seemed to some people) had perhaps too much. His main interests — indeed, addictions — were foxhunting, High Anglicanism, and high government service. The first ran to such an extent that he would often use hunting and shooting figures of speech when wishing to illustrate quite different and even weighty matters; as for the second, he was the quintessential churchman, rather than an introspective man of faith; as to the third, “his career [was] an uninterrupted tale of achievement and promotion.”28 Churchill called him the Holy Fox, which, according to Roberts, was “a rather weak pun” (we do not think so). Perhaps the highest of his honors was his viceroyalty of India (as Lord Irwin), from 1925 to 1931; he was instrumental in the offer of dominion status to India, which Churchill violently opposed. After his return from India Halifax was offered the foreign secretaryship in Ramsay Mac-Donald’s National Government, which he refused. He became Viscount Halifax on the death of his father in 1934 and accepted high positions in the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments. For five months in 1935 he was secretary of state for war—opposing rearmament. In February 1938, as we saw, Chamberlain dismissed Anthony Eden and appointed Halifax as his foreign secretary.
Halifax was an appeaser—indeed, a quintessential, if not an altogether extreme, one. This is not the place to cite his many unfortunate and lamentable judgments about Hitler’s Germany in the years before and during most of 1938; there are innumerable examples of these in his biographies, in those of his opponents, and in various private papers and in public archives. “If not altogether extreme”: because in his particular case there are evidences when his proverbial coolness and calmness of judgment were overpowered by illusions, when in that otherwise so determinedly pragmatic mind his wishes were the father of his thoughts — indeed, they were his thoughts, as when he found Goering “frankly attractive” and Goebbels very “likable.” His understanding of Hitler was for a long time very wanting. On one occasion he compared Hitler’s “mysticism” to that of Gandhi. Upon his return from his most unfortunate meeting with Hitler in November 1937, he wrote to Chamberlain that the colonial issue was “the only vital question” remaining between Germany and Britain. This was a vast misreading, not only of Hitler but of the entire world situation.29 Hitler’s main ambitions were in Europe, not elsewhere. But then Halifax — this was one of the things he had in common with Chamberlain — was not much interested in Europe. That is why Churchill had his sleepless night after Chamberlain dismissed Eden and appointed Halifax. There is a typical Halifaxian reaction to Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938: “Was any useful purpose served by treading on the landslide and being carried along with it?”30 There is a significant coincidence to this phrase. We shall see that on 27 May 1940 Churchill would choose a similar figure of speech, but one with a very contrary implication: when he told Halifax and the War Cabinet that any suggestion of an attempt to negotiate with Hitler would mean that Britain was stepping onto a “slippery slope.” Roberts cites Oliver Harvey as saying, in 1938, that Halifax “easily blinds himself to unpleasant facts and is ingenious and even Jesuitical in rounding awkward corners of his mind,” but Roberts adds that Harvey’s “damning assertion” was incorrect.31 Yet during the spring and summer of 1938 Halifax was not above engaging in many kinds of clandestine contacts and trickeries, including attempts to manipulate the press and some strange statements made to intermediaries of Hitler.32
On a night in September 1938 there came a change. On the fifteenth, Chamberlain suddenly flew to Berchtesgaden to meet Hitler, seeking an agreement with him — an unprecedented journey by a British prime minister. He had the full support of Halifax, as he did again a week later, when Chamberlain flew to Hitler again, this time to Godesberg, where Hitler ratcheted up his demands and showed his ability to threaten. Loath to make any British commitment to Czechoslovakia and France, Chamberlain was willing, perhaps even eager, to go along with what Hitler wanted. There was a cabinet meeting after Chamberlain’s return. Halifax supported Chamberlain to the hilt. His undersecretary Alec Cadogan wrote in his diary: “Still more horrified to find [Chamberlain] had hypnotized [Halifax] who capitulates totally.… I gave [Halifax] a note of what I thought, but it had no effect.” There were two cabinets that evening; after the second “[Halifax] completely and quite happily defeatist-pacifist.… Drove him home and gave him a bit of my mind, but didn’t shake him.”33 Well, he did shake his mind. Next morning he told Cadogan: “Alec, I’m very angry with you. You gave me a sleepless night. I woke at 1 and never got to sleep again. But I came to the conclusion that you were right.” So, almost exactly seven months from the day when his appointment to the foreign secretaryship had given a sleepless night to Churchill, Halifax had his sleepless night. At the next cabinet he suddenly spoke up. Hitler was not to be trusted; eventually Nazism had to be eliminated. Chamberlain was stunned and disappointed. Later that day Halifax told Chamberlain about his sleepless night. Chamberlain answered him acidly, with a humorless sally about the dubious value of night thoughts. But from that time on there was a divergence between Chamberlain’s and Halifax’s views. Churchill, among others, noticed this: “I don’t think [Halifax] is as far gone as the Prime Minister,” he said in February 1939.34 In the summer of 1939, during the last months before the war, Chamberlain (and behind him Horace Wilson) still encouraged all kinds of dubious and dangerous contacts with some of Hitler’s minions; Halifax did not. But once the war began there were no grave clashes among Halifax and Chamberlain and Churchill, all three of them in the cabinet now.
There were, however, differences between Halifax and Churchill on various occasions. During the Reluctant War Halifax was willing to listen (though without committing himself) to various unofficial mediating proposals from all kinds of interlopers. He still had some hope in Goering as a possible successor to Hitler. This did not mean that Halifax was slipping back to appeasement. His principal reason—or at least so he said, on occasion — was to gain time before the full force of the war broke over Britain irrevocably. On 6 May he made an oblique remark in the cabinet, to the effect that “one way to gain time was to delude the Germans by peace talk.”35 The idea of “peace talk” stung Churchill to fury. This was high treason, he said. Halifax wrote him immediately: “You are really very unjust to my irresponsible ideas. They may be silly, are certainly dangerous, but are not high treason. I dislike always quarrelling with you! but most of all on ‘misunderstood grounds.’” Churchill answered instantly, on the same paper: “Dear Edward. I had a spasm of fear. I am sorry if I offended. It was a vy. deadly thought in this atmosphere of frustration. You cd. not foresee this. Forgive me. W.”36 This was a satisfactory exchange between two old-fashioned gentlemen. The quickly penned phrases and even the handwriting reflect rather well the personal characteristics of their writers. However, as Roberts judiciously puts it, “One has to piece together the evidence for Halifax’s relationship with Churchill with care” — and not only because Halifax had “weeded his papers thoroughly.” “Many more discussions between Churchill and Halifax took place, particularly in and around cabinet time, than were recorded or recalled.”37
The inclination to seek compromises, the profound dislike of anything overstated or overwrought, were characteristic of Halifax, not of Churchill. There was more to this than a difference in tactics or perhaps even the difference in their temperaments. Churchill probably understood Halifax better than Halifax understood Churchill, the latter condition having had something to do with Halifax’s unwillingness to ponder Churchill’s thinking thoroughly. It seems that he thought not only that some of Churchill’s proposals or statements were excessive or extreme but that they were superficial. In short, he was ambivalent about Churchill, distrusting him in some things, admiring — or at least respecting — his power in others. There is plenty of evidence for this ambivalence soon after Churchill became prime minister. On 11 May Halifax congratulated Churchill in warmest possible terms. (First sentence: “I know how great is the burden that you have courageously taken upon yourself.” Last sentence: “I need not tell you how wholly my thoughts & wishes are with you in the leadership it now falls to you to give us all. God bless you always.”)38 Yet on the same day Halifax wrote to his son, an MP, “I hope Winston won’t lead us into anything rash.”39 There are numerous references critical of Churchill in Halifax’s culled diaries during these days. Did Halifax “simply calculate that he would be in a more powerful position standing behind the throne than sitting on it”? Perhaps. He thought that Churchill might not last long. Halifax wrote in his diary on 11 May: “I have seldom met anybody with stranger gaps of knowledge, or whose mind worked in greater jerks. Will it be possible to make it work in orderly fashion? On this much depends.” He added, “Certainly we shall not have gained much in intellect.” On 12 May: “Uneasy about Winston’s methods.” On 13 May: “Certainly there is no comparison between Winston and Neville as Chairman.” The same day, in a letter: “I don’t think wsc will be a very good PM though I think the country will think he gives them a fillip.” “He’s an odd creature.” On 14 May: “This makes me mistrust his judgment more than ever.” That day he used the then-current (here and there) term “gangsters” about Churchill’s new crew: “The gangsters will shortly be in complete control.” Yet in the same diary, on 10 May, about Churchill: “He has acted with great public spirit.” On 17 May: “I am much impressed with Winston’s courage.” Finally, on Friday, 24 May: “I had a talk with Winston before dinner; as always he is full of courage.”40 But he was getting ready to confront him in the War Cabinet.
Halifax still took considerable pleasure from his friendship with the king and queen. On 20 May, walking through the gardens of Buckingham Palace (to the gate of which he had his key from the queen) : we “found ourselves enmeshed in a little party on the Lawn, consisting of the King and Queen and the Gloucesters, with whom we had a drink and talk!”41 On 22 May, Leo Amery, a Churchillite, made a speech at Oxford, about which he recounted: “I thought of saying something by way of warning against the Hitler peace offensive but … [the speech was] sent round to Edward [Halifax] who toned it down to something so weak that it almost looked like an invitation to Hitler to offer terms of peace on which we might run out.”42
The time has now come to describe the War Cabinet. After 10 May 1940, the War Cabinet consisted of five men — Churchill, Halifax, and Chamberlain and the two leaders of Labour, Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, who were brought into the coalition, making it a National Government. Sometimes other members of the Outer Cabinet, or high military men, were invited in. Present, too, at times was the cabinet secretary, Sir Edward Bridges; but now and then he was briefly excluded from the room because of the secrecy of the matters being discussed, which happened during the cabinets of 26 and 27 May.
After the tenth of May, even though he had become prime minister, Churchill chose not yet to move into Downing Street. His rooms were in Admiralty House, where some of the War Cabinet meetings were held, though most of them took place at 10 Downing Street, on the upper floors of which Neville Chamberlain and Mrs. Chamberlain still resided. The Cabinet Room was (and still is) on the ground floor of No. 10, at the end of a long corridor. This was a relatively new arrangement. The larger part of No. 10 Downing Street was built in the late seventeenth century. During the nineteenth century “No. 10” became a password, though not all of the prime ministers chose to live there then. During the twentieth century all of them have done so, except for Churchill during the first months of his prime ministership (and except for Tony Blair now). In 1937 Mrs. Chamberlain, who liked living there, chose to rearrange some of the rooms, mostly on the ground floor.43 There is a good description of the Cabinet Room in Ian Colvin’s The Chamberlain Cabinet, a book dealing with 1937-38: “The Cabinet Room, long, narrow and lofty with a table at least twenty-five feet in length, surrounded by sabre-legged and leather-upholstered chairs, had been extended in 1781 with the aid of two Corinthian pillars.” There are some nice candlesticks and cut glass on the table, two mantlepiece clocks, and a fine tall-case clock; in the 1930s there were also bookcases and telephones. “A portrait of Sir Robert Walpole by Van Loo hung over the marble fireplace, in front of which the Prime
“The Cabinet Room, long, narrow and lofty with a table at least twenty-five feet in length, surrounded by sabre-legged and leather-upholstered chairs…’”
Minister’s armchair and inkstand marked the centre of the table.… The tall shuttered windows of the Cabinet Room look out over the low garden wall of Number 10, through plane trees on the Horse Guards Parade and St. James’s Park.” Outside the red baize door, “in the ante-room, brass-framed labels indicated where each Minister might hang his hat.”44
It would seem, at first sight, that Churchill had a comfortable majority in the War Cabinet, not to speak of the Outer one: even if Chamberlain and Halifax were to oppose him, the two Labour ministers would support him, three to two, at worst. This was so, but it only went so far. Attlee and Greenwood were newcomers in the cabinet, and their experience in military and world affairs was limited; besides, they represented a party that was very much of a minority in Parliament. In May 1940 they listened rather than spoke (especially Attlee) in the War Cabinet. A real break between Churchill and the two eminent Conservatives would have been disastrous. Had Halifax or Chamberlain or both resigned, there would have been a national crisis, immediately reverberating in Parliament, and Churchill’s position would have been gravely damaged, perhaps even untenable.
On Friday, 24 May, the War Cabinet met at 11:30 A.M. Most of the discussion involved Calais, about which Churchill talked at some length. It appears that he was not yet informed about Hitler’s halt order. There was, for the first time, mention of Dunkirk: “Considerable numbers of French troops were in Dunkirk, but no English troops had as yet been sent there, with the exception of certain small units sent back to this area from the B.E.F. The port was functioning quite well.”45 Then Halifax brought up the Belgian crisis: there was more discussion about whether preparations should be made for King Leopold III and his family to depart for England, as the queen of Holland and her entourage had done twelve days earlier. Halifax said yes, Churchill, not yet. But there was no real conflict between them on this point.
Neither Churchill nor Halifax knew of a significant development in Washington that day, 24 May. Since the beginning of the war Churchill had had a secret correspondence with President Roosevelt. Halifax knew this and approved it. But — and this is important—as late as mid-May 1940 Roosevelt was not yet confident about the worth of Churchill’s leadership. He had received differing reports about Churchill’s character, not all of them positive.46 There was, too, his ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, who, as we have seen, hated Churchill and thought that England had no chance of (or reason for) resisting Germany. Roosevelt had begun to be aware of Kennedy’s defeatist tendencies; so had Halifax. But more important was the startling nature of the message that Churchill had composed and sent to Roosevelt on 15 May. This was the first revelation of Churchill looking ahead into the abyss, of his recognition that he might be cast aside if Britain were compelled to sue for peace. (Note how early—this is the afternoon of 15 May—Churchill envisages the possibility of France falling.) “As you are no doubt aware, the scene has darkened swiftly,” he wrote. “If necessary, we shall continue the war alone and we are not afraid of that. But I trust you realise, Mr President, that the voice and the force of a United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.” The italics are mine.
Roosevelt answered Churchill’s message twelve hours after its receipt. His tone was friendly, but he did not promise much. Two days later Churchill acknowledged Roosevelt’s response in a short letter of five sentences. “We are determined to persevere to the very end whatever the result of the great battle raging in France may be.… But if American assistance is to play any part it must be available soon.” Another two days later, on the twenty-first, Churchill drafted another letter. He hesitated whether to send it. In the end he did. He felt compelled to impress upon Roosevelt the awful prospect of what might happen. His government might go down in battle, “but in no conceivable circumstances we will consent to surrender.” But:
If members of the present administration were finished and others came in to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants. Excuse me, Mr President, putting this nightmare bluntly. Evidently I could not answer for my successors who in utter despair and helplessness might well have to accommodate themselves to the German will.
Churchill ended, “However there is happily no need at present to dwell upon such ideas.”
Happily no need? Perhaps the prospect of such ideas was unthinkable, but the unthinkable must sometimes be thought about, and the time had come to give it at least some thought. Roosevelt and others in Washington did not realize this fully or even adequately. Roosevelt’s trust in and friendship with Churchill were not yet strong enough. There was still a distance between their minds. For almost another month no important messages would pass between them.
Meanwhile a dangerous fracas broke to the surface in London. A member of the American embassy there, the code clerk Tyler Kent, was a convinced isolationist. Not unlike some American isolationists and at least some Republicans, his extreme dislike of Franklin Roosevelt went hand in hand with his anti-Communism and pro-German worldview. He had taken hundreds of classified documents, including secret messages from Churchill to Roosevelt and vice versa, from the American embassy and hoarded them in his home near Baker Street. He passed some of these to a handful of people, mostly women who hated Churchill and who were German sympathizers, some of the papers then going on to a few British Fascists and even to Italian agents. On 20 May British security police broke into the room of this Baker Street Irregular. Then his diplomatic immunity was waived. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. (At the end of the war he was released and returned to the United States.) It is interesting to note that there was nothing unconstitutional in the contents of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence. It was fortunate that Roosevelt’s ambassador Kennedy, whose political preferences were similar to Kent’s, chose to wash his hands of Kent and would not insist on his immunity. Kennedy the politician chose not to break with Roosevelt before the 1940 election campaign; he did not think that this was the right occasion or the right time to cause open trouble for Roosevelt.47
On 23 May Churchill informed the War Cabinet that the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand had sent a secret and urgent telegram suggesting that in view of the gravity of the situation, the Dominion governments should severally address appeals to President Roosevelt for the release of every available aircraft and that they should also appeal for American volunteer pilots. Churchill’s reply was that he “should not recommend a public appeal at this moment, for it would give the President an impression of weakness.”48 That evening Kennedy met with Halifax. Kennedy was utterly pessimistic about England’s chances and volubly critical of Churchill. He sent a message to Roosevelt in the same vein. Roosevelt was inclined to listen to his friend William C. Bullitt, the American ambassador to France, who had already suggested (on 16 May) that there was the possibility not only of a French but of an eventual British surrender, in which event the British ought to move their fleet to Canada.
This was in accord with Roosevelt’s views. He had begun to realize the swiftness and the gravity of events. Even before his unprecedented attempt at a third term of office, he was beginning to think, somewhat as the British on 10 May had, of a national coalition government. He had talked to his 1936 presidential opponent, Alfred Landon, about this, though as yet without results. Now, on the morning of 24 May, he contacted the prime minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, asking him to send a secret representative to Washington to discuss “certain possible eventualities which could not possibly be mentioned aloud.” On the telephone King was referred to as Mr. Kick, Roosevelt as Mr. Roberts. King thought that the United States was “trying to save itself at the expense of Britain” and told Roosevelt that he should talk about that to Churchill directly.
Roosevelt’s idea (and request) was that Canada and the Dominions should press Churchill to send the British fleet across the Atlantic, the sooner the better—that is, before Hitler’s peace terms could include the surrender of the fleet. Roosevelt added that Churchill should not be told of the American origin of that proposal. Thus Roosevelt himself had come to realize that Britain might have to sue for peace — that is, surrender. Also, he did not quite — yet —trust Churchill.
Of this Churchill — and Halifax — were unaware.
So, too, were the people of Britain largely unaware of the immediacy of the dangers that faced them. This relative unawareness was reflected in the press. This is significant, since even during the war there was considerable freedom of the press in Britain. When it came to secret or sensitive matters the government would rely much less on peremptory state censorship than on the habitual self-censorship of the newspapers’ editors and of their reporters. The historian who wishes to reconstruct from the British newspapers the public opinion of the period may find plentiful illustrations of daily life from various small news items, programs, advertisements, and so on, as the layout and the contents and the very character of British newspapers hardly differed from their makeup before the war; however, as purveyors of the kind of news that was otherwise not available, say, on the radio, the newspapers told little. Only here and there can we find in the newspapers items that reflect expressions or tendencies of public opinion not recorded elsewhere. We shall come to one or two of these in a moment.
Meanwhile, the newspapers’ reportage and comment on the grave and dramatic military events in France and Belgium were generally wanting. About this there was no great difference between the more detailed and highbrow “class” newspapers such as the Times or the Daily Telegraph on the one hand and the popular newspapers on the other. On 24 May the editorial in the Evening Standard was perhaps unusual because of its somber warning to prepare for the worst: “First let us have no ostrichism in our preparations against an invasion of this island. There are still some who scorn the idea. Can Hitler succeed where Napoleon failed? No, they say, the Channel is impregnable, just as others told us some weeks ago that the Meuse was impregnable. We would do better to prepare for the worst.” The editorial of the News Chronicle was sober: “In his brief statement on the war situation yesterday the Prime Minister made it clear that the tide of German penetration into Belgium and Northern France has not yet been stemmed.” Yet it also printed a headline, “French Troops at Suburbs of Amiens,” which was, unfortunately, far from the truth. In the same number the renowned military expert Liddell Hart wrote that bombing power now made it difficult, if not impossible, “to maintain a bridgehead” on a Channel port (fortunately he was to be proved wrong, about Dunkirk at least). A G. G. S. Salusbury, war correspondent of the Daily Herald, was very wrong: “Britain and France are unbeaten. The main French armies, the main British armies, have not yet been seriously engaged.” The Manchester Guardian praised the French “Aged Commanders,” Weygand and Pétain: they had their “coevals in years among the great figures of history.” Weygand was seventy-three, but the Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice had led his army into Constantinople when he was ninety-five. Marshal Pétain was eighty-four, but then Gladstone (still hero of the liberal Manchester Guardian) was still prime minister at eighty-four, and “if (as M. Reynaud tells us) Marshal Pétain is to stay in office until victory had been won he may outlast Gladstone’s record.” Yet the Manchester Guardian’s editorial that day was good: “Vigilance. German arms roll nearer to us every day.… Morale is not preserved by closing the eyes. Too much had been lost in this war already by refusals to believe that certain things could happen.” There is a prewar, if not Edwardian, touch in the programs announced by the Manchester theaters for the week following 24 May: The Chocolate Soldier in the Opera House. Gaietés de Montmartre in the Gaiety Theatre. (In the two large movie theaters, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Destry Rides Again, with Marlene Dietrich.) The main article in the Daily Telegraph was written by J. B. Firth, a historian and biographer of Cromwell. Its tone was Churchillian: “Now is the time for the British people to show the stuff of which they are made and the heights to which they can soar.… Hitler’s peace propaganda before the war was directly designed to spread terror.… Duty calls us to close ranks at home against the slightest sign of national disunity.” Was this whistling in the dark? Perhaps not. The “London News and Comment” section of the Scotsman declared on 24 May, “The confidence of the Londoner remains unshaken by the news from France, even though it is graver.”49
Three items appearing in most of the newspapers on 24 May may have some significance. One was the front-page treatment, and unanimous approval, of the government’s decision to arrest Oswald Mosley and his wife, together with the Germanophile Captain Ramsay, member of Parliament, and other Fascists (more than one thousand of them). Other, less agreeable evidence of superpatriotism were numerous letters to editors and even some articles protesting against the presence and the free movements of German refugees (those writing were either unaware of or indifferent to the condition that most of these refugees were anti-Nazis and Jews).50 Suspicion of aliens showed up in many newspapers: in the News Chronicle there were a number of letters critical of refugees (“Where does their money come from?”). On the same page the News Chronich reported that the Dagenham Girl Pipers had applied “for permission to form a defence rifle corps”
One interesting sign — interesting mostly because of its longrange significance — was the attention devoted in the newspapers to relations with Russia: a kind of anxious looking around for eventual allies. This accorded, by and large, with the intention of the government—of Halifax as well as of Churchill — to improve these relations, to send Sir Stafford Cripps on another mission to Moscow, as early as 18 May. On the twenty-fourth the News Chronicle quoted R. A. Buder: “We are taking immediate steps to improve our relations with the Soviets.” “Our London Correspondent” of the Manchester Guardian had a telephone interview with G. B. Shaw, who praised both Stalin and the British resolution to fight to the bitter end: “An understanding with him is vital.” That understanding would not come for a long time, although not for a lack of British willingness for it. When on 22 June 1941 Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union brought about a de facto alliance between Britain and Russia, there followed a wave of Russophilia in Britain, partly of course because of the relief that people felt not only about the course of the war but also about the slackening of the German bombing of Britain. Yet such inclinations, including illusions about Russia, had their forerunners in May 1940, and not only among leftist intellectuals or elements of the British working class.
The Mass-Observation reports recorded, as usual, reactions and expressions that were more varied than what appeared in the press. The summary “Morale Today” of 24 May reported little change, “though perhaps a slight increase in anxiety and a slight decrease in optimism. There is a general recognition of the seriousness of the situation, but still extremely little idea that this could be more than a temporary setback or could lead to an attempt to invade ourselves” [sic]. The general impression is of an uneasy fluctuation of moods: “It cannot be good for people’s nerves to pin so much on the small incidents of each day, to give a great gasp of relief and happiness at a headline about Arras, to be plunged into temporary gloom by bad news about Boulogne.” “A new feature today is the great increase and sometimes intense violence of criticism against the French.”51 “All these remarks apply particularly to the upper and middle classes, and to women.” Yet in the same report there is an account of a conversation among middle-aged trade unionists: “Do you know, our women went round canvassing for the Housewives Union and some of them, especially some of the younger housewives they talked to — have got to the stage where they would more or less welcome Hitler here. They say it couldn’t be worse, and they’d at least have their husbands back.” “That’s right.… They say it can’t be worse, so what’s the good of fighting? I can see that if the morale goes on the decline so steep as it is at the moment, there won’t be much resistance to him, when he does come.”52
But that was not typical. More typical was the universal approval for the arrest of Mosley. And perhaps the words of “Nella,” an M-O reporter in Bolton who wrote 2 million words during the war, published in a book forty years later. On 11 May she wrote: “If I had to spend my whole life with a man, I’d choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.”53 One interesting condition in both the M-O and the Ministry of Information reports and diaries is the almost entire absence of comments about Halifax. People were indifferent, even ignorant, about him. There is a single report of the words of one man on 11 May: “Halifax wants to be made Archbishop of Canterbury. He doesn’t want to be in the Cabinet.”
