MAY 28, 1940
LONDON, ENGLAND
3:00 P.M.
Winston Churchill takes the floor.
One hundred and seventy miles across the English Channel from Abbeville, and at almost precisely the same time General de Gaulle orders his 4th Armored Division to attack, the prime minister is formally recognized by the longtime Speaker of the House of Commons, Edward FitzRoy.
Churchill rises slowly from his front-row seat. The chamber is full to the backbenches. Cirrus clouds of tobacco smoke layer over the room. The exhausted prime minister dramatically dons round-framed glasses while removing his notes from a jacket pocket. Churchill normally inserts stage directions into written speeches, reminding himself when to expect laughter or a round of applause. But this is not that sort of speech. This, in fact, is news of the worst kind.
So Churchill is startled as a cheer rises before he speaks a single word. He begins his preamble, then launches into the meat of his dire oratory:
“The situation of the British and French Armies now engaged in a most severe battle and beset on three sides and from the air, is evidently extremely grave,” Churchill tells Parliament, his voice dark. “The House should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings.”
In the months to come, as life grows more desperate in England, Tuesdays will mark Churchill’s weekly lunch with King George VI at Buckingham Palace. No staff will be allowed in the room and the men will serve themselves from a side table. The king will chain-smoke British-made Wills cigarettes and ask questions. Churchill will brief the sovereign on the wretched state of the war in the most candid and honest way he knows how. George VI was initially opposed to the selection of Churchill as prime minister. In time, lunch by lunch, they will become friends—even allies.*
Yet there was no such lunch with the sovereign today, and Winston Churchill is quite sure he has no allies. Churchill is just hours away from losing the title of prime minister, if his enemies get their way. After less than three weeks on the job, there are questions about his leadership, sobriety, and, above all, ability to save the nation.
Churchill has spent the past few days—and more than an hour this morning—squabbling with Britain’s foreign secretary about peace with Germany. The prime minister is determined to fight like a true Briton as on distant battlefields like Khartoum and the Crimea, never bowing to a foreign conqueror in the face of desperate odds. Yet the tall, patrician Lord Halifax is equally adamant that Churchill seek peace with Adolf Hitler and Germany despite knowing all too well that this armistice will be dictated on the Führer’s terms.
Royal luncheon or not, Churchill has still enjoyed his daily ration of Pol Roger with lunch, a habit he has enjoyed since 1908. “I could not live without champagne,” Churchill often says, paraphrasing Napoleon. “In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.”
Today is not a victory, and it is not yet a defeat. But as every man here in the House of Commons knows, and as the people of London learned while reading their morning newspaper, Belgium has officially surrendered to Germany. If France is the next domino to fall, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich will own complete control of western Europe. There is no longer any army on the continent capable of rising up to defeat Germany. The likelihood of this conquest of the continent remaining in place for decades is very real. Europe is about to become a fortress, a prison, and a tomb, completely sealed off from the world—the residents of all nations within destined to live out their lives in the iron grip of Nazi tyranny without any hope of rescue or escape.
This is not just an ideological theory or even fatalist thinking, as Churchill was accused of believing before the Phony War ended on the morning of May 10. It is fact. And while the pressing matter of Great Britain’s future weighs heavily upon Churchill, he is more immediately consumed by the staggering reality that more than a quarter million British soldiers are stranded on the beach at Dunkirk, soon to be forever confined within Hitler’s Fortress Europe.
The British troops are faced with four choices: fight to the death; find a way to punch a hole through the Nazi lines and escape; remain in Dunkirk and hope for rescue; or fly the white flag of surrender.
Winston Churchill adds a fifth option: victory.
“I have only to add,” he tells the House of Commons, “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.”
“Hard and heavy tidings” have already begun. Unbeknownst to the prime minister, just yesterday nearly one hundred soldiers of the Royal Artillery’s Cheshire Regiment were captured while retreating to Dunkirk. They were bravely fighting a rear guard action to cover the retreat of other units, putting their own lives in jeopardy so that others might reach safety, when the men ran out of ammunition and were forced to surrender. The British soldiers, along with a handful of French stragglers, lay down their arms and put up their hands.
The German soldiers accepting their surrender are not common troops of the Wehrmacht, as the regular German army is known. These young men are elite members of the brutal 1st Panzer Division of the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s military branch, men who do not recognize such legalities as codes of the Geneva Convention that guarantee a prisoner humane treatment.
By tragic coincidence, as Prime Minister Churchill speaks in London, and as General Charles de Gaulle’s B1 bis tank commanders open fire on the Germans at Huppy, the Cheshire Regiment is being ordered at gunpoint to strip off their uniforms and boots. Their pant pockets and rucksacks are searched. Personal letters and photographs are destroyed so the bodies will never be identified. Naked but still maintaining their composure, every man refrains from panic as they are herded into a small milking shed near the French village of Wormhoudt. There is barely enough room for the entire group.
The SS throw grenades into the barn, but two British soldiers hurl their bodies atop the explosives to stifle the blasts, giving their own lives to save those of their comrades. Enraged, the callow SS soldiers then fire into the barn with semiautomatic weapons. When that is done, the Nazis walk slowly past the bodies, searching the pile of corpses for survivors. A single shot is fired into the back of the head of any British soldier who moans or cries out when kicked. In this way, eighty British and one French soldier are murdered. Fifteen more survive by hiding for hours under the corpses of their friends.
“The troops are in good heart, and are fighting with the utmost discipline and tenacity,” Churchill tells Parliament. He cannot possibly know the sacrifice now being made by the men of the Cheshire Regiment, but his words invoke the spirit of their selflessness—indeed, that of the entire British Expeditionary Force, huddled on the sands of Dunkirk, prepared to give their lives in the pursuit of freedom.*
Then Churchill adds, somewhat mysteriously, that a plan is already in motion to save those British lives. “I shall, of course, abstain from giving any particulars on what, with the powerful assistance of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, they are doing or hope to do.”
Operation Dynamo has begun.
The British are coming home.