By nightfall on 10 May 1940 Churchill was Prime Minister. He later wrote of how, when he went to bed that night, he was conscious ‘of a profound sense of relief. At last I had authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’ Yet there was still some Conservative opposition to his emergence as Prime Minister; on May 11 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.’
Family, friends, and a wide circle of supporters rejoiced at Churchill’s Premiership. ‘All your life I have known you would become PM, ever since the Hansom Cab days,’ wrote Pamela Lytton, his girl-friend of forty years earlier. ‘Yet, now that you are, the news sets one’s heart beating like a sudden surprise. Your task is stupendous.’ And from his son Randolph came a letter of filial encouragement: ‘At last you have the power and authority out of which the caucus have cheated you and England for nine long years! I cannot tell you how proud and happy I am. I only hope that it is not too late. It is certainly a tremendous moment at which to take over. I send you all my deepest wishes for good fortune in the anxious days ahead.’
From the outset of Churchill’s Premiership, daily dangers threatened the survival of Britain. To help make up the deficiencies in aircraft, Churchill appointed Lord Beaverbrook to be Minister of Aircraft Production; Eden went to the War Office and Sinclair to the Air Ministry. These were friends on whom he knew he could count to get on with their jobs without the need for constant prodding. His offer to Lloyd George of the Ministry of Agriculture was turned down; Lloyd George no longer felt confident in victory. Attlee became Churchill’s deputy in the War Cabinet. Ernest Bevin became Minister of Labour and National Service, and Herbert Morrison Minister of Supply. Churchill relied on these Labour men to sustain the enormous effort needed to increase war production and maintain the unity of the nation.
On the afternoon of May 13 Churchill summoned all his Ministers to Admiralty House and told them, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ He repeated these words a few hours later in the Commons, when he declared:
You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.
But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, ‘Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.’
Returning to Downing Street, Churchill learned that Hitler’s armies were driving deeper and deeper into Holland, Belgium and France. He wanted to take an immediate initiative, bombing Germany, but the neglect of Britain’s air power before the war was one reason why the War Cabinet decided, on May 13, that this could not be done; Lord Halifax put it bluntly when he called Britain ‘the nation in the weaker position’. Two days later, with Italy still neutral, Halifax suggested that ‘it might be of value’ if Churchill sent a personal message to Mussolini.
Churchill agreed to do so. In the message, which was sent on the following day, he asked, ‘Is it too late to stop a river of blood from flowing between the British and Italian peoples?’ Whatever the course of the battle in France, ‘England will go on to the end, even quite alone, as we have done before, and I believe with some assurance that we shall be aided in increasing measure by the United States, and indeed by all the Americas.’ This was also Churchill’s theme when he telegraphed to Roosevelt that day, May 15, his telegram also containing words of foreboding: ‘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 force of the 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.’
On the morning of May 16, as German troops broke through the Maginot Line, news reached London of an imminent French withdrawal which would expose Britain’s Expeditionary Force to danger. Determined to exert whatever personal influence he could to prevent a withdrawal, Churchill flew to Paris; there he found the French High Command without any plan of counter-attack. That evening he sent a telegram to the War Cabinet in London to ask if the French requests for extra British fighter and bomber help could be met: ‘It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted.’ The War Cabinet agreed.
On the morning of May 17 Churchill flew back to London. ‘Winston is depressed,’ noted his Junior Private Secretary, Jock Colville. ‘He says the French are crumpling up as completely as did the Poles, and that our forces in Belgium will inevitably have to be withdrawn in order to maintain contact with the French.’ At the War Cabinet on May 18 Neville Chamberlain, whom Churchill had appointed Lord President of the Council, suggested that Churchill himself broadcast to the nation on the following night, to indicate ‘that we were in a fix and that no personal considerations must be allowed to stand in the way of measures necessary for victory’.
Churchill accepted Chamberlain’s suggestion; it was his first broadcast as Prime Minister since taking office nine days earlier. ‘Is this not the appointed time for all to make the utmost exertions in their power?’ he asked, and went on to speak of the ‘groups of shattered States and bludgeoned races; the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians—upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall.’
The nation was inspired by Churchill’s broadcast. ‘I listened to your well-known voice last night,’ Baldwin wrote from his home in Worcestershire, ‘and I should have liked to have shaken your hand for a brief moment and to tell you that from the bottom of my heart I wish you all that is good—health and strength of mind and body—for the intolerable burden that now lies on you.’ Captain Berkeley, who ten days earlier had written in his diary that ‘Winston has no judgment’, wrote on May 20: ‘The PM gave a magnificent broadcast address last night. He is being “sublime” at every stage and after narrowly averting a serious collapse in Paris four days ago has been galvanising everybody here.’
The burdens on Churchill that evening were as great as any he had faced. They were highlighted immediately after the broadcast by his decision, taken after anguished consultation with Air Chief Marshal Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, not to send any more bombers to fight in the air above France, despite urgent French appeals for more; every bomber in Britain might soon be needed to try to beat off a German invasion of Britain itself. That same night, anticipating that it might be necessary to try to extricate the British forces from France as they were driven back towards the sea, Churchill asked the Admiralty to assemble ‘a large number of small vessels in readiness to proceed to ports and inlets on the French coast’.
One avenue of potential and immediate supplies was the United States; Churchill remained determined to acquire the use of the fifty First World War destroyers that were lying idle in American naval yards. But Roosevelt would not agree to send them; his advisers feared Britain would be defeated and that the destroyers would then fall into German hands. Learning on May 20 that Roosevelt had even been told by Joseph Kennedy, his Ambassador in London, that the British might seek a negotiated peace with Hitler, Churchill telegraphed to the President: ‘Our intention is, whatever happens, to fight on to the end in this Island, and provided we can get the help for which we ask, we hope to run them very close in the air battles in view of individual superiority.’
Churchill added: ‘Members of the present Administration would likely go down during this process should it result adversely, but in no conceivable circumstances will we consent to surrender. 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.’
The defeat of the British forces in France might lead Hitler to seek a quick victory in Britain itself; that night, in anticipation of a possible imminent German invasion, Churchill ordered all vulnerable airfields, that is, those with no defence forces available, to be guarded with local volunteers, and all soldiers in infantry depots who had not yet taken a musketry course to be exercised ‘in firing a few rounds of ball ammunition’. Even as Churchill issued these instructions, advance units of the German Army, reaching Abbeville, drove a wedge between the British and French forces in northern France; in the summer of 1918 Churchill had warned Lloyd George that this precise move was a possibility; he had specifically named Abbeville as the point at which the Germans would reach the sea and divide the Allied armies.
The German troops at Abbeville now struck northward along the Channel Coast. Twenty-four hours later they were approaching Boulogne. Churchill decided to return to France to see if he could persuade the French to try to link up with the now isolated British force. Reaching Paris shortly before midday on May 22, he asked the new French Commander-in-Chief, General Weygand, if French troops would participate in a strategic plan whereby the British and French forces, attacking from both north and south against the German wedge, would cut off the Germans on the coast and enable the separated Allied armies to link up. ‘I will try,’ was Weygand’s reply. Returning to London that afternoon Churchill was ‘almost in buoyant spirits’, General Ironside noted; but within a few hours reports began to reach him that the French fighting spirit was ‘bad’.
Weygand made no northward move. On May 24 the British were forced to evacuate Boulogne. The British troops in Calais were being shelled. Churchill was upset by what he saw as a lack of energy on the part of the local British commander, in not going to the aid of the men at Calais, writing angrily to the head of his Defence Office, Major-General Sir Hastings Ismay, ‘Of course if one side fights and the other does not, the war is apt to become somewhat unequal.’ Later he learned that action had in fact been taken to send a relief force to Calais, but that the main need was now to keep Dunkirk open for troops and shipping, as the Germans drew their net tighter and tighter round the Channel ports.
That week, in utmost secrecy, the code-breakers at Bletchley, their extraordinary success in Norway having been to no avail, succeeded in breaking the Enigma machine cypher used by the German Air Force in France. This was a more complicated cypher than the one used in Norway, and one in which as many as a thousand top-secret messages were passing each day between German Air Force headquarters and units in France and Flanders. These messages threw considerable light on German Army operations as well as Air Force activities. But it was from German documents captured in the field that the British learned on May 24 of a German plan to cut the British forces off from the sea. Seeking an immediate counter-measure, that night Churchill ordered ‘an advance north to the ports and the beaches’.
The Army was to be extricated, if possible, and brought home; the Navy was to prepare ‘all possible means for re-embarkation, not only at the ports but on the beaches’. Once the Army was brought back from France, Churchill told his Ministers, ‘he thought we could hold out in this country’. Two days later Reynaud flew to London, calling on Churchill at Admiralty House to tell him that he could ‘hold out no hope that France had sufficient power of resistance’. Captain Berkeley noted: ‘Reynaud was not impressive. The PM was terrific, hurling himself about, getting his staff into hopeless tangles by dashing across to Downing Street without a word of warning, shouting that we would never give in etc.’
That evening the order was issued for the evacuation by sea of as many soldiers as could be taken off from the quaysides, jetties and beaches of Dunkirk. To prevent the Germans reaching Dunkirk from the west, the British troops at Calais were ordered to hold out; they would not be evacuated. Having approved what Ismay called this ‘grim’ decision, Churchill was ‘unusually silent’ during dinner at Admiralty House ‘and he ate and drank with evident distaste’. As he rose from the table, Churchill told Eden that he felt ‘physically sick’; two months later, in Parliament, he was to call the men who held out at Calais ‘the bit of grit that saved us’.
***
On May 27 the United States asked to lease British airfields in Newfoundland, Bermuda and Trinidad. Churchill, still denied the destroyers that he believed to be vital for Britain’s survival, refused. The United States had given Britain ‘practically no help in the war’, he told the War Cabinet that day, ‘and now they saw how great was the danger, their attitude was that they wanted to keep everything that would help us for their own defence’. On the eastern flank of the Dunkirk perimeter, he was told, a Belgian battalion holding a crucial sector ‘had been wiped out by a wave of sixty enemy bombers’. That evening the Belgian King called for an armistice, with effect from midnight.
In distant Scandinavia, the long-awaited yet now almost forgotten Norwegian campaign reached a climax on the night of May 27 with the successful occupation of Narvik by British, French and Polish troops. What the victorious troops there did not know was that, because of the urgent need for troops to defend Britain, their commanders were already under orders to withdraw from Narvik within a week. That same night, at Dunkirk, 11,400 British troops had been rescued; 200,000 were still encircled, together with 160,000 French troops.
In the Commons, Churchill spoke on May 28 of how the Belgian Army ‘has fought very bravely and has both suffered and inflicted heavy losses’. Nevertheless, its surrender had added ‘appreciably’ to the peril of the troops at Dunkirk, whose situation was ‘extremely grave’. The House should prepare itself for ‘hard and heavy tidings’. Nothing that might happen at Dunkirk, however, ‘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’.
As he waited that day for further news from the beaches, Churchill listened in the secrecy of his five-member War Cabinet to Halifax’s suggestion that Britain should take up an offer from Mussolini to negotiate a general peace. Chamberlain seemed to support Halifax, telling his colleagues that ‘while we would fight to the end to preserve our independence, we were ready to consider decent terms if such were offered to us’. Churchill was dismayed and angered. It was a thousand to one against any such ‘decent terms’ being offered. ‘Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those who surrendered tamely were finished.’ He was supported by the two Labour members of the War Cabinet, Attlee and Greenwood. Fortified by their toughness, when he spoke a few moments later to the full Cabinet, twenty-five Ministers in all, he reiterated his belief that Britain would rather go down fighting than negotiate peace. ‘He was quite magnificent,’ Hugh Dalton, newly appointed Minister of Economic Warfare, wrote in his diary. ‘The man, and the only man we have for this task.’
Churchill told the full Cabinet that he had thought carefully over the past two days ‘whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man.’ The Germans would demand Britain’s Fleet, her naval bases, and much else. Britain would become a ‘slave state’ with a puppet Government ‘under Mosley or some such person’. Yet Britain still had ‘immense reserves and advantages’, and, he concluded: ‘I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’
There were immediate cries of approval all round the table; Churchill’s Ministers were united, and inspired. ‘Quite a number,’ he later wrote, ‘seemed to jump up from the table and come running to my chair, shouting and patting me on the back.’ There was no doubt, he added, ‘that had I at this juncture faltered at all in leading the nation I should have been hurled out of office. I am sure that every Minister was ready to be killed quite soon, and have all his family and possessions destroyed, rather than give in.’ When the members of the War Cabinet met again a few moments later, Churchill told them that he did not remember having ‘ever heard before a gathering of persons occupying high places in political life express themselves so emphatically’.
Churchill’s ability to believe that every Minister was ready to be killed, and have his family killed, rather than give in, and his ability to convince others that it was so, was a potent factor enabling the nation to face the terrifying prospect of invasion, and the cruel reality of aerial bombardment. But there were still those in the War Cabinet who wished to continue their discussion of a possible negotiated peace. Chamberlain, however, having veered away from his earlier opinion, suggested that evening that Britain should persuade Reynaud ‘that it was worth his while to go on fighting’. Halifax, however, was not convinced; he again proposed that negotiations take place through the Italians. He also wanted a public declaration of British war aims, if only, he explained, to win American support. What was really needed to impress the Americans, Churchill retorted, was ‘a bold stand against Germany’.
Later that evening, seeking an extra counter to Halifax’s waverings, Churchill offered Lloyd George a place in the War Cabinet. But the former Prime Minister, whose tenacity Churchill had so admired in the First World War, declined. ‘Several of the architects of this catastrophe are still leading members of your Government,’ he told Churchill, ‘and two of them are in the Cabinet that directs the war.’
This was true; but Churchill did not dare to break the sense of national unity by removing Chamberlain and Halifax from the War Cabinet. He was confident that he could create so strong an atmosphere of determination throughout the country, that the doubts of the waverers would not weaken the national resolve.
By midnight on May 28 a further 25,000 troops had been taken off from the beaches of Dunkirk. On the following day as many as 2,000 troops an hour were being got away safely. A vast armada of boats large and small, including paddle-steamers and pleasure craft from dozens of coastal holiday resorts, was crossing and recrossing the North Sea to rescue them. Many were sunk, and hundreds of soldiers and rescuers killed, by the unceasing German air attacks. That night, in an attempt to encourage the resolve of his own Ministers and senior civil servants, Churchill issued a single-page exhortation which read: ‘In these dark days the Prime Minister would be grateful if all his colleagues in the Government, as well as high officials, would maintain a high morale in their circles; not minimising the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve to continue the war till we have broken the will of the enemy to bring all Europe under his domination. No tolerance should be given to the idea that France will make a separate peace; but whatever may happen on the Continent, we cannot doubt our duty and we shall certainly use all our power to defend the Island, the Empire and our Cause.’
This message, signed ‘WSC’, was circulated to all thirty-five War Cabinet and other Ministers, all thirty-nine Junior Ministers, forty-six ‘High Officials’, and the six Dominion representatives.
On the morning of May 30 Churchill gave orders for the French troops on the Dunkirk beach-head to be allowed to share the available shipping. Even though it must reduce the number of British troops embarked, he said, ‘for the common good this must be accepted’. By midday, more than 100,000 troops had been taken off and had reached Britain safely since the start of the evacuation, despite the continual German air attacks. More than 860 vessels were now involved in the evacuation, and as many as four thousand troops being taken off each hour. As Churchill monitored these movements he remained emphatic that French troops must be taken off as well. If not, he said, ‘irreparable harm’ might be done to Britain’s relations with France.
How much longer the evacuation could continue was unclear. On the afternoon of May 30 Churchill informed the Commander-in-Chief of the Expeditionary Force, Lord Gort, that once no further organised resistance was possible, he was authorised ‘to capitulate formally and to avoid useless slaughter’. Fearing that a German invasion might follow immediately after the evacuation, and the capture by the Germans of vast quantities of British military equipment, Churchill told the War Cabinet that Britain ‘should not hesitate to contaminate our beaches with gas’ if this could be done to advantage. That day, in the hope, even at the eleventh hour, of stimulating French resistance, Churchill again flew to Paris, together with Attlee, General Dill and Ismay. The presence of German fighters in the skies north of the city forced a substantial detour, first to Weymouth to pick up an escort of nine Hurricanes, then across the Channel to Jersey, then crossing the French Coast west of St Malo, then due east to Villacoublay near Versailles, where, for a while, the plane was virtually lost at the wrong end of the vast aerodrome.
In Paris, Churchill and Attlee faced Reynaud and Pétain; the latter, in civilian clothes, looking ‘senile, uninspiring and defeatist’, Ismay later recalled. ‘No sort of good spirit on the French side’ was Berkeley’s comment.
Churchill told the French leaders that the evacuation of Narvik would begin in forty-eight hours; the 16,000 French and Polish troops being evacuated would be transferred to France to defend Paris. Further British troops would be sent to western France, together with Canadians, to build up a land force there, also for the defence of Paris. There were already two British divisions in Western France, and only three ready for action in Britain itself. No more help could be spared. The fourteen further divisions in Britain were undergoing training equipped only with rifles ‘and therefore totally unfit for modern warfare’. Ten British air squadrons were fighting in France; the remaining twenty-nine squadrons were desperately needed to deal with any German air attack on Britain’s aircraft factories: if these were put out of action ‘the situation would then become hopeless’.
Britain and France must remain in the closest accord, Churchill said. For this reason he would give orders to get French troops ‘off first from now on’ at Dunkirk. He was ‘absolutely convinced’ that the two countries had only ‘to carry on the fight to conquer’. Even if one of them should be struck down, the other must not abandon the struggle. ‘The partner that survives will go on.’ If, through some disaster, Britain were laid waste, the Government was prepared ‘to wage war from the New World’. If either ally were defeated, Germany ‘would give no quarter: they would be reduced to the status of vassals and slaves forever’.
Reynaud was visibly moved by Churchill’s words, but not so Pétain. Listening to Churchill saying goodbye to them, Louis Spears later recalled how he knew from Churchill’s tone ‘that he realised in his heart that the French were beaten, and that they knew it, and were resigned to defeat’. After a night disturbed by a German air raid, a ‘petty raid’ Churchill later called it, the Englishmen prepared to return to London. ‘Winston was ebullient as ever,’ Berkeley noted. ‘When we started back he insisted on pacing round the aerodrome to review our nine Hurricanes, tramping through the tall grass in the flurry of propellers with his cigar like a pennant.’
Reaching London without incident, Churchill was shown a proposal that, in the event of invasion, the Royal Family and the Government should be evacuated to Canada. He replied that ‘no such discussion’ was to be permitted. The Germans were not to have the pleasure of any such evacuation: ‘I believe we shall make them rue the day they try to invade our island.’ That evening he was told that the Germans were about to overrun the Dunkirk beaches. Six ships had been sunk that morning and many soldiers drowned. His first response was to continue the evacuation for one more day, but he accepted the arguments of the Chiefs of Staff that any further evacuation would be impossible.
Churchill and his advisers were certain that the moment the Dunkirk evacuation ended, and Germany was in control of the Channel Coast of France, Hitler would launch his invasion of Britain. Yet even as the last Allied troops were taken off the Dunkirk beaches, and German forces prepared to take prisoner those who had not been able to get away, Churchill was able to breathe more freely. On June 1 War Office Intelligence interpreted the Enigma decrypts as meaning that the Germans were likely to complete the overrunning of France before turning against the United Kingdom. Thanks to this triumph of signals intelligence, Churchill knew that Britain had its first breathing-space, however short. When, that same day, the Director of the National Gallery proposed sending the most valuable paintings to Canada, he answered: ‘No, bury them in caves and cellars. None must go. We are going to beat them.’
By first light on June 3 the Dunkirk evacuation came to an end; 224,318 British and 111,172 French troops had been taken off. Seventy-one heavy guns and 595 vehicles had also been saved at Dunkirk, though the Germans captured a mass of war material. Of the 222 Royal Navy vessels involved in the evacuation, thirty had been sunk, including six destroyers. But with the danger of immediate invasion known by Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff to be over, it was agreed to send two British divisions to western France, with a third to follow. At the same time, British bombers would give priority to French-nominated targets.
Churchill was in fighting mood, telling Colville on June 3 that he was ‘tired of always being on the defensive’ and was contemplating ‘raids on enemy territory’. This mood was reflected on the following day in a minute to Ismay: ‘How wonderful it would be if the Germans could be made to wonder where they were going to be struck next, instead of trying to force us to wall in the Island and roof it over. An effort must be made to shake off the mental and moral prostration to the will and initiative of the enemy from which we suffer.’ After visiting his father that day, Randolph wrote to him on return to his Army camp, ‘I cannot tell you how stimulating & reassuring it was to see you again & to find you so full of courage & determination.’ Churchill was also alert to any apparent slackening of effort, writing that day to Lindemann: ‘You are not presenting me as I should like every few days, or every week, with a short clear statement of the falling off or improvement in munitions production. I am not able to form a clear view unless you do this.’
That week the war in the air was Churchill’s main cause for concern; in the three previous weeks, during the battle over France and Flanders, 453 aircraft had been manufactured, but 436 shot down. Nevertheless, the battle in the skies above France had been the first British air victory of the war, with 394 German planes destroyed above the Dunkirk beaches for the cost of 114 British aircraft. Given an almost three-to-one German superiority in numbers of aircraft, these British losses were hard to bear, but on June 4 Beaverbrook was able to assure Churchill that fighters were now being manufactured at a rate of thirty-five a day, with a weekly production rate of more than two hundred aircraft. That same day Churchill learned from Arthur Purvis, his chief arms negotiator in Washington, that half a million American rifles and five hundred field-guns were ready for shipment. But destroyers could not be spared; that was Roosevelt’s decision, conveyed with ‘regret’.
Speaking on June 4 in the House of Commons, Churchill admitted that when the date of his speech had been fixed a week earlier, ‘I feared it would be my lot to announce the greatest military disaster in our long history’. He had not expected more than 20,000 or 30,000 men to have been got safely away from Dunkirk. What had happened was ‘a miracle of deliverance’, but, he warned, ‘we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.’ In his peroration, which, he explained to Roosevelt, was addressed ‘primarily to Germany and Italy’, Churchill declared:
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.
The House of Commons was deeply moved; ‘That was worth 1,000 guns, & the speeches of 1,000 years,’ wrote the Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood. ‘Even repeated by the announcer,’ Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband, ‘it sent shivers (not of fear) down my spine, I think one of the reasons why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases is that one feels the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind them, like a great fortress: they are never words for words’ sake.’
Churchill had no illusions as to the severity of the task ahead. Even though the Germans had decided not to turn on Britain until France was defeated, the defeat of France could not be far off. That night he wrote to Baldwin, in reply to his letter of good wishes: ‘We are going through very hard times & I expect worse to come: but I feel quite sure better days will come: though whether we shall live to see them is more doubtful.’ Churchill ended his letter, ‘I do not feel the burden weigh too heavily, but I cannot say that I have enjoyed being Prime Minister very much so far.’
***
On June 5, only twenty-six days after having crossed into France, the German Army began its offensive towards Paris. That day, seeking every possible means to help the French, Churchill proposed a series of ‘butcher and bolt’ raids on the German-held coast, with tanks being carried across the Channel in flat-bottomed boats ‘out of which they can crawl ashore, do a deep raid inland, cutting vital communications, and then back, leaving a trail of German corpses behind them’. While the best German troops were attacking Paris, only ‘ordinary German troops of the line’ would be left in many towns. ‘The lives of these must be made an intense torment.’
The German advance was so swift, however, that there was no time to prepare any such hit-and-run raids. The division of British troops in northern France, commanded by General Fortune, was being forced back to the Channel Coast with heavy losses. Off Narvik, on the last day of the evacuation, three British warships were sunk and 1,500 sailors and evacuees drowned. Frustrated at the daily reports of withdrawal and delay, Churchill wrote to Pound on June 6: ‘We seem quite incapable of action.’ To Eden he wrote that same day, about the delays in bringing troops back to Britain from Palestine and India: ‘We are indeed the victims of a feeble and weary departmentalism.’ He was also annoyed by Reynaud’s continual demands for greater British air support, reminding him on June 7 that 144 British fighters had operated over France on the previous day, but agreeing to send twenty-four barrage balloons, with crews, from Britain to Paris, for the defence of the French capital.
That was the end of the help Britain could give; on the evening of June 8 Churchill, Sinclair and Beaverbrook decided that no more fighters could be sent to France without the danger, Reynaud was told, ‘of ruining the capacity of this country to continue the war’. On the following day Reynaud sent his newly appointed Under-Secretary for National Defence, General Charles de Gaulle, to London, to ask that the whole of Britain’s Air Force be engaged in the Battle for France. Churchill explained to de Gaulle that once these aircraft were destroyed, there would be no means of protecting Britain from the air assault that must precede any German invasion. De Gaulle understood the British dilemma and priority. ‘Speaking for himself, he agreed with our policy,’ Churchill reported to the War Cabinet as de Gaulle flew back to France, and he added that the young general had given ‘a more favourable impression of French morale and determination’.
It was too late. Even the launching on June 9 of Churchill’s earlier Admiralty scheme for dropping mines in the Rhine, though seriously disrupting the Rhine traffic, could no longer influence the battle in France. That day the British forces under General Fortune were driven to the sea at St Valery-en-Caux. Fog prevented their evacuation. Then, as German troops began their assault on Paris, Italy declared war on both Britain and France. ‘People who go to Italy to look at ruins,’ Churchill commented that night, ‘won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii again.’
On June 10 Churchill decided to fly once more to France, to encourage the French to defend Paris. As he prepared to leave he learned that the French Government was evacuating its capital. ‘What the hell,’ was his immediate comment. ‘It seemed,’ wrote Colville, ‘that there was no perch on which he could alight.’ The French Cabinet had gone southward to the River Loire. There, on June 11, at the Château de Muguet, not far from the town of Briare, he was confronted by the French leaders in disarray. Reynaud and de Gaulle were all for trying to continue the fight, possibly from western France. Weygand and Pétain were convinced that the fight was already lost. Churchill spoke of the coming British help, if the French could hold out over the ‘lean weeks’. A Canadian division was landing in France that night. One of the British divisions withdrawn from Dunkirk would arrive in about nine days’ time. The troops withdrawn from Narvik were on their way. A third British division was available if the French could provide the artillery for it. If France could hold out for nine months, until the following spring, the British would have trained and equipped as many as twenty-five divisions ‘to place at the disposal of the French command, to employ anywhere’.
Spring 1941 was much too far off for Weygand and Pétain; almost too far for Reynaud and de Gaulle. But it was an offer seriously meant, and made in order to instill confidence. When Weygand spoke, it was to hold out no hope, either for Paris or for any large town to the south: ‘I have no reserves. There are no reserves.’ Churchill again urged the French to hold on ‘for another three or four weeks’, when the British and Canadian forces building up in western France could attack the German flank. Weygand replied that it was ‘a question of hours’, not days or weeks. Churchill then spoke of defending Paris so fiercely that, refusing to accept defeat, it would absorb immense armies. ‘The French perceptibly froze at this,’ noted Spears. ‘To make Paris a city of ruins will not affect the issue,’ said Marshal Pétain. Nor would Pétain allow himself to be influenced by Churchill’s reference to the Marshal’s courage in adversity in March 1918, when Churchill and Clemenceau had visited him at Beauvais and found him a tower of strength.
Churchill then suggested that if a ‘co-ordinated defence’ failed, Britain could help France to maintain ‘guerilla warfare on a gigantic scale’. With intense and visible wrath, Pétain told Churchill that this would mean ‘the destruction of the country’. Nor did Reynaud dissent. Churchill then tried to paint a long-term picture of hope. ‘It is possible the Nazis may dominate Europe,’ he said, ‘but it will be a Europe in revolt, and in the end it is certain that a regime whose victories are in the main due to its machines will collapse. Machines will beat machines.’ Hearing this, Eden later recalled, Pétain was ‘mockingly incredulous’. Nor did the French, other than de Gaulle, respond to Churchill’s final suggestion that they hold out in Brittany, to which British reinforcements could then be sent, as well as French troops from North Africa. That evening Reynaud told Churchill that Pétain had already informed him ‘that it would be necessary to seek an armistice’.
Churchill slept at the Château de Muguet; then, on the morning of June 12 he flew back to Britain, seeing from 8,000 feet the port of Le Havre in flames. That day General Fortune was forced by superior German air and artillery power to surrender his division at St Valery-en-Caux. In the evening, Reynaud telephoned Churchill to tell him that the French Government had left Briare for Tours, and to ask if Churchill would return to France. He agreed to do so, driving to Hendon airport on the morning of June 13 with a member of his Defence Secretariat, Colonel Leslie Hollis. ‘I remember the morning well,’ Hollis later wrote. ‘It was a warm day with the sun shining. I marvelled at the calmness and serenity everywhere, and then realised with a shock that hardly anyone in the crowds of people out in the sunshine—the clerks, the typists in their summer frocks, the shoppers—realised what fearful danger faced Britain. I was already so used to living near calamity that I had imagined others felt as I did.’
On reaching Hendon at eleven o’clock, Churchill learned that bad weather was forecast for later that day. Because of this, the Air Staff advised that the flight be postponed. ‘To hell with that,’ Churchill told Hollis. ‘I’m going, whatever happens! This is too serious a situation to bother about the weather!’ Awaiting Churchill at Hendon were Beaverbrook, Ismay, Halifax, Halifax’s senior adviser, Alexander Cadogan, and the Supreme War Council’s interpreter, Captain Berkeley. Flying in two aircraft, the British mission crossed the Channel from Weymouth to the Channel Islands, and then on to Tours. ‘Thunderstorm and rain as we arrived on pock-marked aerodrome,’ Cadogan noted in his diary. Ismay later recalled how Tours airfield ‘had been heavily bombed the night before; but we landed safely and taxied around the craters in search of someone to help us. There was no sign of life, except for groups of French airmen lounging about by the hangars. They did not know who we were, and cared less. The Prime Minister got out and introduced himself. He said, in his best French, that his name was Churchill, that he was Prime Minister of Great Britain, and that he would be grateful for a “voiture”.’
A car was found and Churchill drove into Tours, to the Préfecture. As Reynaud had not yet arrived, the British group lunched at the Grand Hotel; while they did so, the Secretary of the French War Cabinet, Paul Baudouin, arrived, and began at once to talk, Churchill later recalled, ‘in his soft silky manner about the hopelessness of French resistance’. Baudouin’s pessimistic talk was an ill-omen, and yet, Hollis later recalled: ‘Churchill paid no attention to this Niagara of doom; he might have been hearing an actor declaiming the decline of hope in some stage tragedy. His mind was made up; the defeatism of others could not change his intention.’
The luncheon ended, and the British group returned to the Préfecture. Reynaud had still not arrived nor did anyone seem to know where he was. Churchill waited, his time at Tours limited; as the airfield had no lights, the pock-marked condition of the runway made a take-off after dark impossible. Eventually Reynaud arrived, as did two more Englishmen, Sir Ronald Campbell, the Ambassador, and General Spears. As the group went up the stairs to the meeting, Churchill hung back, until he could ask Spears about Baudouin. ‘I told him’, Spears later recalled, ‘that he was now doing his damnedest to persuade Reynaud to throw in the sponge.’ He was ‘working on behalf of Weygand and Pétain’. Churchill then ‘growled’ that he had gathered as much.
The British and French representatives were shown into a room on the first floor; there was no table, but a desk at which sat Georges Mandel, the Minister of the Interior. General Ismay later wrote to Churchill about this meeting with Mandel: ‘When we found him in his office at the Préfecture after our lunch at the hotel, he was energy and defiance personified. His lunch, uneaten, was on a tray in front of him, and he had a telephone in each hand and was snapping out decisive orders in every direction. He was the only ray of sunshine—except when you inspired Reynaud to courage—that we ever saw on the French side.’
Churchill was pleased to see and hear Mandel, a friend from the inter-war years. But Mandel, who was later to be murdered by pro-Nazi Frenchmen, was not a member of the Supreme War Council, and had to withdraw almost at once. Reynaud then took Mandel’s place at the desk, telling Churchill, in grave tones, that the French Government would soon have to plead for an armistice. Britain would be asked to release France from her earlier pledge not to make a separate peace with Germany. A former French Prime Minister, Edouard Herriot, who was at the Préfecture that afternoon, later learned that as Reynaud made this request ‘tears streamed down Mr Churchill’s face’.
Churchill urged Reynaud to delay the decision to seek an armistice. ‘Was another week possible, or less?’ he asked. Reynaud made no reply. He did agree, however, that there would be ‘no separate peace’ at least until Roosevelt had been asked to take ‘a further step forward’. Churchill promised to telegraph to Roosevelt at once. Given ‘immediate help’ from America, ‘perhaps even a declaration of war’, he told Reynaud, victory was ‘not so far off’. These were fighting words, and effective ones. ‘The meeting finished in a much more confident mood on the part of Reynaud than had appeared possible,’ Captain Berkeley noted in his diary. ‘He is obviously fighting a desperate battle against the majority of his Cabinet, Weygand, and countless other occult forces, and Winston’s brave assurances comforted him.’
On the drive to the airfield Churchill begged Reynaud: ‘Don’t give in, don’t go over to the enemy. Fight on!’ That day the Germans entered Paris, the sixth European capital to fall to their forces in nine months; Warsaw, Copenhagen, Oslo, The Hague, and Brussels already lay under Nazi domination.
There were now more than 150,000 British and Canadian troops in western France, and more were landing that day at Cherbourg. They could join the French in holding Brittany, or even move forward towards the German flank west of Paris. But on the afternoon of June 14 it was learned in London that Weygand had rejected any resistance in Brittany. Churchill at once ordered a halt to any further disembarkation of British troops, while still hoping that those already in western France might move forward. That evening he spoke on the telephone to their commander, General Alan Brooke, to whom he put his ideas for an offensive. But after nearly half an hour of the strongest possible advocacy for action, Churchill accepted Brooke’s judgment that all British forces must be brought back to Britain.
In the early hours of June 15 Churchill learned that the United States would not come to France’s aid. Later that morning, with Chamberlain’s full support, he telegraphed to Roosevelt urging him to think again. A declaration by the United States that ‘it will if necessary enter the war’ might, Churchill said, ‘save France’. Failing any such declaration ‘in a few days French resistance may have crumpled and we shall be left alone’. Churchill added, ‘If we go down you may have a United States of Europe under Nazi command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New World.’
Despite a second forceful telegram to Roosevelt later that day, Churchill was unable to get any American declaration of war. During June 15 he considered flying back to France, to Bordeaux, to which the French Government had now withdrawn, to make arrangements for the transfer of the French Fleet to Britain in the event of a French surrender. He did not go, however, fearing that his advocacy that France continue the fight at this late stage would be resented. Seven months later, however, he told Roosevelt’s emissary Harry Hopkins that if he had gone to Bordeaux ‘in those last fateful days’ he might have been able ‘to tip the balance in favour of further resistance overseas’.
On the morning of June 16 Churchill learned that France was about to ask for an armistice. At the War Cabinet that morning it was agreed to release France from her earlier pledge not to enter into a separate negotiation with Germany ‘provided, but only provided, that the French Fleet is sailed forthwith to British harbours’. Churchill and his advisers were fearful that the Germans would use the many fine warships of the French Fleet to help launch an invasion of Britain, but they had no way of enforcing any such proviso, and the French Fleet remained in its ports.
Could nothing be done to prevent a French surrender? In London, a member of the French Economic Mission to Britain, René Pléven, who many years later was to be a peacetime Prime Minister, suggested the political union of Britain and France. Their sovereignty would be merged and their defensive capabilities united. There would no longer be two States fighting separately to survive, and being knocked out one by one. Even if the new Union were defeated by the Germans in France, it would continue the fight in Britain. There could thus be no separate surrender; the 250,000 French troops then in western France, far from laying down arms, would be evacuated to Britain to fight as an integral part of the new Union. The French Fleet would sail to British ports as part of the Union’s fleet.
On first hearing of the idea of an Anglo-French Union, Churchill was dismissive of it. But so many of his advisers liked it that during June 16 he thought again. Perhaps, even at the eleventh hour, it would enable Reynaud to stand up to Pétain and Weygand. Chamberlain was keen, as was General de Gaulle, who had come to London on the previous day to authorise a shipment of arms, then on its way from the United States to France, to be landed in Britain instead. ‘Some very dramatic move was essential,’ he told Churchill, who agreed to give the idea of Union his support. A Declaration of Union was at once prepared; it was ready at 4.30 that afternoon. De Gaulle wanted Churchill to fly with it to Bordeaux on the following morning and give it to Reynaud, believing that it would enable Reynaud to keep France in the war. The War Cabinet suggested that Churchill, Attlee and Sinclair should all go to France, as representatives of the three main British political parties, to discuss the Declaration with Reynaud.
A train was at once organised, to leave London for Southampton at 9.30 that evening. A cruiser was alerted at Southampton to take Churchill to Concarneau, on the Brittany coast, to meet Reynaud at noon the next day. Just as he was leaving Downing Street, accompanied by Clementine, who wanted to see him off at the station, a telegram arrived, ‘Meeting cancelled, message follows.’ Captain Berkeley noted in his diary: ‘Winston refused to be put off, and drove down to Waterloo, and stuck there for half an hour while Ismay and Pound in turn begged him to be reasonable. Finally he went back to Downing Street to await further news.’ The news came shortly before midnight: at a crisis meeting of the French Government at Bordeaux all Reynaud’s skills at seeking to postpone an armistice had been in vain. Pétain and Weygand had won the day. The Declaration of Union could no longer be a factor in the fate of France; it was not even made public.
That night Reynaud resigned; Pétain formed a Government and within a few hours asked the Germans for an armistice. Britain was alone. ‘We have become the sole champions now in arms to defend the world cause,’ Churchill declared in a two-minute broadcast that afternoon. ‘We shall do our best to be worthy of this high honour. We shall defend our Island home, and with the British Empire we shall fight on unconquerable until the curse of Hitler is lifted from the brows of mankind. We are sure that in the end all will come right.’
Throughout June 17 British troops were being taken back from France; when the liner Lancastria was bombed at St Nazaire, nearly three thousand troops and civilians on board were drowned. Churchill forbade publication of the news of Britain’s worst maritime loss of the war, telling his advisers, ‘The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least.’ That same day the deposed Reynaud wrote to Churchill from Bordeaux: ‘The project of Franco-British Union is worthy of your imagination and your daring. It is there that the future lies for our two countries.’ That evening, de Gaulle, a strong advocate of Union, was flown back to Britain. To ensure that he would become a focus of French resistance, Churchill approved a proposal by Desmond Morton to spend British Government money on a public relations expert to promote his name and cause.
Churchill had now to raise the morale of the nation and to sustain it; as part of this task he made every effort to stop the growing call for scapegoats for the pre-war neglect of Britain’s defences, telling the House on June 18: ‘There are many who would hold an inquest in the House of Commons on the conduct of the Governments—and of the Parliaments, for they are in it, too—during the years which led up to this catastrophe. They seek to indict those who were responsible for our affairs. This also would be a foolish and pernicious process. There are too many in it. Let each man search his conscience and search his speeches. I frequently search mine.’ Churchill went on to warn, ‘Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.’
In this same speech, Churchill told the House that under Beaverbrook’s energetic direction the number of aircraft being manufactured in Britain had risen from 245 to 363 a week. Now it was the pilots, Churchill said, who would have ‘the glory of saving their native land, their island home, and all they love, from the most deadly of all attacks’. What Weygand had called the ‘Battle of France’ was over. ‘I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years men will still say, “This was their finest hour”.’
Churchill repeated this speech over the radio four hours later. He was tired, and to those who had heard it earlier in the Commons it sounded much less convincing in its broadcast form; but to those who heard it for the first time as they sat around their wireless sets, it was an inspiration. These were ‘only words’, he later reflected. Foreigners, who did not understand ‘the temper of the British race all over the globe when its blood is up, might have supposed that they were only a bold front, set up as a good prelude for peace negotiations’. He knew that ‘Rhetoric was no guarantee of survival’. Peace terms might have been offered for which many ‘plausible excuses’ could have been presented. Many might have asked why Britain should not join the ‘spectators’ in neutral Japan, the United States, Sweden and Spain, to watch with detached interest, ‘or even relish a mutually destructive struggle between the Nazi and Communist Empires?’
That night 120 German bombers attacked eastern England; nine civilians were killed. A new phase of the war had begun. ‘Let us get used to it,’ Churchill told the House of Commons in a Secret Session on June 20. ‘Eels get used to skinning.’ Steady and at times intense bombing must become a ‘regular condition’ of British life. The outcome of the battle would depend upon ‘the courage of the ordinary man and woman’.
From western France more than 111,000 British troops had been evacuated; about 16,000 had been taken prisoner. ‘It may well be,’ Churchill told the Secret Session, ‘our fine Armies have not said goodbye to the Continent of Europe.’ Britain was already making plans ‘for 1941 and 1942’. Would she be able to hold out that long? At Chequers that weekend, the slow pace of United States supplies, grave anxiety about the future of France, and secret knowledge of the extent of Britain’s own weakness should Germany invade, caused almost unbearable concern. The strain on everyone who knew the full extent of the dangers was considerable; it was greatest on Churchill, whose responsibilities, so recently acquired, were formidable, yet whose power, so long denied, might still prove insufficient to avert defeat. His own mood reflected the grimness of the hour, affecting even his personal behaviour, so much so that one of his friends complained that weekend to Clementine, who wrote to her husband:
My Darling,
I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know.
One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner—It seems your Private Secretaries have agreed to behave like school boys & ‘take what’s coming to them’ & then escape out of your presence shrugging their shoulders. Higher up, if an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming.
I was astonished & upset because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you—I said this & I was told ‘No doubt it’s the strain’.
My Darling Winston—I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be. It is for you to give the Orders & if they are bungled—except for the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury & the Speaker you can sack anyone & everyone. Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness & if possible Olympic calm.
You used to quote:—‘On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme’—I cannot bear that those who serve the country & yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you. Besides you won’t get the best results by irascibility & rudeness. They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality—(Rebellion in War Time being out of the question!)
Please forgive your loving devoted & watchful
Clemmie
Clementine ended this letter with a sketch of a cat. Then she tore the letter up. Four days later she pieced it together and gave it to her husband. The stresses on Churchill were widely understood. ‘You must indeed have had a terrible time during the last fortnight,’ Samuel Hoare wrote from Madrid a week later.
***
On June 21 Churchill learned that as a result of decrypts from the German Air Force’s most secret radio communications, a system of intersecting beams had been uncovered along which German bombers were flying by night on to a precise target, on which their bombs would then drop automatically. Knowing that Britain’s night-fighters were then almost powerless, the news of the beams was, he later recalled, ‘one of the blackest moments of the war’. But the young scientist who had uncovered them, R.V. Jones, also had the answer to them; the beams could be bent, throwing the raider off course, whereby he would drop his bombs in the open countryside.
Each day during the last week of June and the first week of July, Churchill discussed anti-invasion plans with his advisers, suggesting areas of urgent research and immediate preparation, visiting the beaches on which the Germans might land, and meeting the divisional commanders whose task would be to repel the invader. He was much impressed when one of these commanders, General Montgomery, carried out a mock attack on a coastal airfield which was presumed to have been captured. At dinner that evening in Brighton, as the two men watched through the window a platoon of soldiers preparing a machine-gun post in a kiosk on the pier, Churchill told Montgomery that when he was at school near there in the 1880s he used to go and see the performing fleas in that very kiosk.
As part of the German armistice terms, Hitler had insisted, as Churchill feared, on the surrender of the French Fleet. Those French warships which were then at Alexandria could easily be seized by the British naval forces in Egypt. Those at Toulon and Dakar were beyond Britain’s reach. But those at the French naval base of Mers el-Kebir, at Oran, including two battle-cruisers and four cruisers, were within range of British naval forces in the Mediterranean. Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff were determined to deny these warships to the Germans, even if it meant opening fire on Britain’s ally of two weeks earlier. But first they planned to send Admiral Phillips and Lord Lloyd direct to Oran, to appeal to the French naval authorities there not to allow the ships to fall into German hands; then they gave the French naval commander there, Admiral Gensoul, three options: to sail his ships to a British port and join the Royal Navy as an ally against Germany; to sail his ships to a British port and hand them over to British crews; or to sail to a French West Indies port and accept demilitarisation, with immediate repatriation of the crews to France if they so desired. A fourth option was added when the first three proved unacceptable; to scuttle his ships in the harbour at Mers el-Kebir.
Despite long negotiations throughout the morning and afternoon of July 3, Admiral Gensoul refused to go back on the terms of the Franco-German Armistice. He would accept none of the British options, not even the last. In this he was supported by the former French Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Darlan, who was now Minister of Marine. Darlan, loyal to Pétain’s Government, which had been established with German approval at Vichy, insisted that the armistice terms be implemented; Gensoul and his men should pay ‘no attention’ to British demands, he telegraphed, and should ‘show themselves worthy of being Frenchmen’.
Darlan’s instruction was communicated by radio signal to Gensoul; a similar instruction communicated to the French Admiral at Dakar was known to the British. The War Cabinet realised that the instruction sent to Dakar must be the same as that sent to Oran. Gensoul had lost all freedom of action; at 5.55 the British Admiral off Oran, Sir James Somerville, gave the order for his ships to open fire. When Somerville called a cease-fire five minutes later, one of the two French battle-cruisers had been beached, a cruiser blown up, and 1,200 French sailors killed. The second battle-cruiser had managed to slip out of harbour and reach Toulon unharmed under cover of darkness. ‘I need hardly say,’ Churchill told the Commons on the following day, ‘that the French ships fought, albeit in this unnatural cause, with the characteristic courage of the French Navy.’ More bitterly he confided to Dudley Pound, ‘The French were now fighting with all their vigour for the first time since the war broke out.’
Within a few days ‘Oran’ had become a symbol of British ruthlessness and determination. Six months later Churchill told Roosevelt’s emissary, Harry Hopkins, that Oran had been ‘the turning point in our fortunes, it made the world realise that we were in earnest in our intentions to carry on.’ This was no moment, he told the Commons on July 4, for ‘doubt or weakness; it is the supreme hour to which we have been called’. Invasion was probably imminent, he warned, and the Government was making every possible preparation: ‘I feel that we are entitled to the confidence of the House and that we shall not fail in our duty, however painful.’ Despite German propaganda that Britain was ready to enter negotiations for a compromise peace, the war would be prosecuted ‘with the utmost vigour by all the means that are open to us until the righteous purposes for which we entered upon it have been fulfilled.’
Churchill had spoken for just under half an hour. When he sat down the whole House rose and cheered. As they did so his eyes filled with tears. ‘Up till that moment,’ he later recalled, ‘the Conservative Party had treated me with some reserve, and it was from the Labour benches that I received the warmest welcome when I entered the House or rose on serious occasions. But now all joined in solemn stentorian accord.’
Anti-invasion preparations now dominated Churchill’s waking hours. Unlike Paris, he assured Josiah Wedgwood, London would be defended street by street and suburb by suburb; it ‘would devour an invading army, assuming one ever got so far. We hope however to drown the bulk of them in the salt sea.’ Churchill also gave orders for the destruction of oil-storage tanks on the east coast once the invading forces were approaching them. Most of these were the same oil depots he had been responsible for defending in 1914. A month later, in drafting instructions for policemen, soldiers and members of the Home Guard who might be in towns overrun by the Germans, he wrote: ‘They may surrender and submit with the rest of the inhabitants, but must not in those circumstances give any aid to the enemy in maintaining order, or in any other way. They may however assist the civil population as far as possible.’
Seeking some means of taking the war to Germany, on July 8 Churchill told Beaverbrook that the ‘one sure path’ to a British victory was a bomber offensive against Germany. If Hitler were repulsed on the beaches of Britain, or did not try to invade at all, he would ‘recoil eastward’. Although Britain could do nothing to stop him going east, ‘there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.’ That week Churchill commented to Colville: ‘Even if That Man reached the Caspian, he would return to find a fire in his backyard. It would avail him nothing if he reached the Great Wall of China.’
That July the bombing initiative lay with Germany; on July 9 dockyards in South Wales were bombed. That week eighty-eight civilians were killed, but, as a result of a War Cabinet decision, the figures were kept secret. ‘I never hated the Hun in the last war,’ Churchill told one of the south coast Generals on July 11, ‘but now I hate them like an earwig.’ If the Germans were to invade, he commented on the following day, the Home Guard must be armed to face them, and even women must be ‘allowed to fight’.
As German bombers intensified their attacks over Britain, the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force fought them with skill and courage. In a broadcast on July 14 Churchill told the nation: ‘We await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or—which is perhaps a harder test—a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy—we shall ask for none.’ Not only in Britain but in every land there were vast numbers of people ‘who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warrior; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age.’
That night Churchill warned Ismay that ‘everybody should be made to look to their gas masks now’. Many masks would require overhauling. Action should be taken at once. On the following day, determined not to allow Hitler’s occupation forces to be unmolested, he invited Hugh Dalton to take charge of ‘a new instrument of war’, the Special Operations Executive, soon known by its initials as SOE, to co-ordinate all subversion and sabotage against the Germans overseas. ‘And now,’ Churchill told Dalton, ‘set Europe ablaze.’ It was to prove a difficult, dangerous and often disheartening task, in which the Germans had many successes in disruption and deception; but within three years a formidable array of networks and agents had penetrated almost every region of German-occupied Europe, organising escape routes for Allied aircrew and soldiers, carrying out rescue and Intelligence-gathering tasks in co-operation with local patriots, setting up and arming local sabotage groups, and preparing local Resistance forces for the day when the Allied armies would land, whether in Italy or northern Europe, or in due course Burma, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, and would need active local participation behind the lines.
On July 24 an agreement was signed in Washington whereby the United States would manufacture 14,375 aircraft for Britain in the coming twenty-one months. Similar agreements were being negotiated for the manufacture of rifles, field-guns, anti-tank guns and their ammunition. These agreements, which were kept strictly secret, gave Churchill renewed confidence in the long-term prospects of waging an offensive war. So also did the arrival that month of the first twenty-six of 238 reconnaissance aircraft built for Britain in the United States. But still the Americans held back on sending destroyers. To encourage them, Churchill reluctantly agreed to a full exchange of technical secrets, giving the Americans Britain’s radar knowledge, and her latest developments in air-to-air and ground-to-air communication.
Churchill also sent Roosevelt a personal appeal on July 31 for ‘fifty or sixty of your oldest destroyers’, ending his telegram: ‘Mr President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now. Large construction is coming to me in 1941, but this crisis will be reached long before 1941. I know you will do all in your power, but I feel entitled and bound to put the gravity and urgency of the position before you. I am sure that with your comprehension of the sea affair, you will not let the crux of the battle go wrong for want of these destroyers.’
Still Roosevelt hesitated, fearing that a British defeat would give Germany not only the Royal Navy, but also any American vessels which might be transferred to Britain as Churchill wished. German command of the Atlantic would be America’s danger. But naval reinforcements were badly needed, as shipping losses mounted; on August 7 Churchill was distressed to learn that the Mohamed Ali el-Kebir, with 732 British military and naval personnel on board, had been sunk by a German submarine in the North Atlantic. Only when he was told that six hundred of those on board had been rescued did he recover his equanimity. But it made his quest for the American destroyers all the more urgent; he therefore proposed offering America the use of Britain’s naval bases in the West Indies in return for leasing the destroyers. At the same time, in an exercise in confidence and ingenuity that amazed those who heard it, he told his weekend guests at Chequers that within a year he hoped to be able to launch a series of ‘formidable’ raids on German-held Europe, landing forces of 10,000 men to seize the Cherbourg Peninsula, to invade Italy, or to land in Holland for a ‘destructive’ strike into the Ruhr.
The reading of Germany’s top-secret Enigma signals on August 10 made it clear that no preparations for invasion had been made for at least the next month. This gave Churchill, the Chiefs of Staff and their advisers a further month to make their preparations; and to concentrate on the growing war in the air. For the previous three days German bombers had not attacked. ‘The swine had needed three days in which to lick their wounds before they came again,’ was Churchill’s comment. When the next raid came, on August 11, sixty-two of the raiders were shot down, for the loss of twenty-five British planes. Those of the German aircrews who were not killed were taken captive; the British pilots who survived being shot down over Britain could, and did fight again, some within a matter of hours. But 526 British pilots had been killed in action in June and July. At Chequers that night Churchill told his guests that the life of Britain now depended on the intrepid spirit of the airmen. He added, his voice trembling with emotion, ‘What a slender thread the greatest of things can hang by.’
During renewed German daylight bombing raids on August 14, despite much damage to factories and dockyards, seventy-eight German aircraft were shot down over Britain, for the loss of only three British pilots. That evening Churchill was given further good news; Roosevelt had accepted the destroyers-for-bases deal, in return for Newfoundland, Bermuda and the Bahamas being added to the West Indies bases which Churchill had offered to lease to America for ninety-nine years. When Colville remarked that Roosevelt’s reply ‘rather smacks of Russian demands on Finland’, Churchill told him, ‘The worth of every destroyer is measured in rubies.’ But at the same time Churchill told the British Ambassador in Washington that any public announcement of the conditions would have a ‘disastrous effect’ on British morale. The illusion of a self-reliant Britain had to be maintained.
The Blitz was at its height. On August 15 a hundred German bombers struck at dockyards, factories and airfields in the North-East. At the same time, as part of what was to become known as the Battle of Britain, eight hundred German aircraft tried to pin down Britain’s fighters in the South and destroy their landing grounds. In the North-East, thirty of the hundred German bombers were shot down for the cost of only two British pilots injured. In the South, forty-six German aircraft were shot down, for the loss of twenty-four British fighters, and the death of only eight pilots. That evening, at Downing Street, Churchill was ‘consumed with excitement’ as news of the successful struggle was brought in to him, so much so that he drove to Fighter Command headquarters at Stanmore to watch the course of the battle from its nerve-centre. By the end of the day, seventy-six German aircraft had been shot down; Churchill telephoned Chamberlain, then gravely ill in the country, to tell him the good news.
On August 16 Churchill followed the battle from the operations room of 11 Group, Fighter Command, at Uxbridge. Almost all Britain’s fighter squadrons were in the air that day, in combat, but forty-seven British aircraft were destroyed by the Germans while still on the ground. As he was driven away from the operations room, Churchill turned to Ismay with the words, ‘Don’t speak to me; I have never been so moved.’ After about five minutes he leaned forward to Ismay with the words, ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’ He repeated these words four days later when he gave the House of Commons a survey of the war; they were words that would ‘live as long as words are spoken and remembered’, Asquith’s daughter Violet wrote to him, and she added: ‘Nothing so simple, so majestic & so true has been said in so great a moment of human history. You have beaten your old enemies “the Classics” into a cocked hat! Even my father would have admitted that. How he would have loved it!’
There was another sequence of sentences in Churchill’s speech of August 20 that expressed the public mood of defiance and confidence. Revealing the destroyers-for-bases deal with the United States, which meant that the two countries would in the coming years have to be ‘somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage’, Churchill said that it was a process he could not stop even if he wished: ‘No one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.’
Churchill followed up his words with deeds. A month earlier Roosevelt had agreed, under conditions of the strictest secrecy, to send a high-level mission to London to hold discussions on possible areas of joint Anglo-American strategic co-operation. The mission’s true purpose was hidden under the title ‘Standardisation of Arms Committee’. To welcome its three members to Britain, Churchill gave them a dinner at 10 Downing Street on August 22, two days after his ‘Mississippi’ remarks. His personal inspiration was itself an element in Britain’s war-making powers; when General Pakenham-Walsh had been sent on a mission to the United States a month earlier, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for War asked Churchill to see him first, ‘in order that he may have the glow of Mount Sinai on him when he reaches Washington’. Churchill kept his private thoughts to his inner circle, telling them at the end of August that the United States was ‘very good in applauding the valiant deeds done by others’.
***
The time had come to regularise the system of war policy-making that had worked since May under the pressure of violent and uncertain events. On becoming Prime Minister, Churchill had also appointed himself Minister of Defence, with Ismay as head of his Defence Office. It was as Minister of Defence that he presided at the Chiefs of Staff Committee; the three Chiefs of Staff, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, General Sir John Dill and Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall, met daily to make the decisions for immediate action, as well as future operations. When Churchill did not attend, he was represented by Ismay.
The relationship between Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff was one of mutual respect, fortified by the need to work closely together for a common purpose against a ruthless enemy. Each decision of war policy had to be approved by the three Chiefs of Staff; if they did not agree with one of Churchill’s proposals for action, then that proposal could not go ahead. But the issues on which he and the Chiefs of Staff were in agreement far outnumbered those over which they were in dispute. In the main, their relationship was close, constructive and far-seeing, forged in the crucible of danger and the need for survival.
Even at the level of the Chiefs of Staff, Churchill’s leadership was remarkable; ‘He provided the flow of ideas, the stimulus and drive, and the political guidance,’ a member of the Defence Secretariat, Colonel Ian Jacob, later wrote. ‘They turned all this into a consistent military policy and saw to it that plans were matched by resources.’ One of Churchill’s Private Secretaries, John Peck, later recalled ‘their deep respect, even on the frequent occasions when they disagreed with him, for his military talents if not genius’. There were even times, Peck added, when the Chiefs of Staff turned to Churchill for military guidance. Those who saw Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff at work agreed that they made, in Jacob’s words, ‘a formidable combination’.
On August 24 Churchill prepared a note on what should be the relationship of the various war-policy groups that now existed. A Joint Planning Committee of senior Service officers and Intelligence chiefs would suggest plans for military, naval and air operations. The Joint Planning Committee would also ‘work out details of such plans as are communicated to them by the Minister of Defence’, that is, by Churchill himself. All these plans would then be referred to the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and, if approved, would go ahead without further consultation.
If, however, the Chiefs of Staff Committee had any ‘doubts and differences’, the plans would then go to a newly established Defence Committee of the War Cabinet, consisting of Churchill, Attlee, Beaverbrook, and the three Service Ministers, Eden, Sinclair and A.V. Alexander. During the discussions of the Defence Committee, the Chiefs of Staff would be present, as would Ismay.
In explaining the purpose of the Defence Committee, Churchill told Eden that he felt ‘sure’ that he could count upon the three Service Ministers on it ‘to help me in giving a vigorous and positive direction in the conduct of the war, and in overcoming the dead weight of inertia and delay which has so far led us to being forestalled on every occasion by the enemy.’ The Defence Committee quickly became the arbiter of all war operations. The War Cabinet was the arbiter of all decisions outside the sphere of operations. The Cabinet itself became the principal instrument for carrying out the policies decided upon by the Defence Committee and the War Cabinet; each Minister not on the Committee was entrusted with wide areas of responsibility and was expected to fulfil his tasks without interference, and with energy.
The co-ordination of these efforts was entrusted to the Cabinet Office, under the supervision of the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, who was also Secretary to the War Cabinet. ‘His advice was honest and fearless,’ John Martin, one of Churchill’s Private Office, later recalled, ‘and he was ready to stand up to Churchill if he disagreed with him. In return the Prime Minister came to place great reliance on his judgment and turned to him to ensure the execution of his policies.’ Among Bridges’ tasks was to ensure that the highest degree of secrecy was maintained throughout the administration; this he did with skill and tact.
A remarkable war-making instrument was in place; Churchill, with his forceful energy, his long experience and his unswerving faith in a victorious outcome, provided it with the impetus and the fire.
***
Also on August 24 Churchill asked for Major Jefferis, whom he had first met at the Admiralty while planning to drop mines into the Rhine, to be promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel. Jefferis, who had much impressed Churchill by his inventiveness and energy, was in charge of the Army’s experimental establishment at Whitchurch, only ten miles from Chequers; it was later brought under Churchill’s direct control at the Ministry of Defence, and was visited by Lindemann every two weeks. Sometimes examples of the latest bombs, mines and explosives were brought over to Chequers to be demonstrated to the Prime Minister.
It was on August 24 that German bombs first fell in daytime in central London. On the following day, as retaliation, eighty British bombers struck at Berlin. On August 26 Churchill saw an Air Ministry note that the next target was Leipzig. He did not approve. ‘Now that they have begun to molest the capital,’ he told the Chiefs of Staff, ‘I want you to hit them hard, and Berlin is the place to hit them.’
For the next twelve days, no fewer than six hundred German bombers struck each day at British cities and airfields. Churchill often watched the raiders from the roof of one of the Government buildings in Whitehall. But he was aware of how little any one man could do to affect the battle in the skies, the battle of pilot against pilot. ‘Each night,’ he told Colville on August 27, ‘I try myself by Court Martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground, anyone can go through the motions, but something really effective.’
On August 28, Churchill visited the coastal defences at Dover and Ramsgate, where, having seen the effect of German bombing, he gave orders that all civilians whose houses had been damaged or destroyed ‘should receive full compensation’. He also gave orders for the more rapid filling of bomb craters on the coastal airfields. His mood was robust, but not brusque or sour; a member of the American mission whom he had taken with him to the coast thanked him not only for the trip, ‘but because a man loaded with responsibility can at the same time be the genial host that you were’.
That weekend at Chequers, Churchill again discussed possible offensive action with the Joint Planning Committee. One idea he put forward was the capture of Oslo, thereby undoing ‘Hitler’s first great achievement’. Another was the seizure of some North German territory, ‘so that the enemy might be made to experience war in his own land’. These ideas, he added, were ‘just to study’. Churchill had all his life been a believer in the Classical adage ‘Neglect no means’. But he recognised how dependent he was on the energy and initiative of others. ‘Very fine arguments are always given for doing nothing’, he minuted on September 5.
When Churchill spoke in the Commons on September 5 he withheld details of the most recent British losses. These had been heavy; fifty fighter pilots killed in a single week, and 469 civilians, many of them workers in aircraft factories. There was also a major success which had to remain secret, the sending through to Malta, which was then under Italian air bombardment, of four warships from Gibraltar carrying anti-aircraft guns and other essential supplies. The Admiralty had resisted this operation, and was still reluctant to do the same for the longer run to Egypt. ‘Naturally,’ Churchill minuted on the following day, ‘they all stand together like doctors in a case which has gone wrong. The fact remains that an exaggerated fear of Italian aircraft has been allowed to hamper operations.’
Nearer home, misinterpreted Intelligence indications led on September 6 to the fear of a German invasion on the following day. At seven minutes past eight on the evening of September 7 the code-word ‘Cromwell’ was sent to all British forces in the United Kingdom, alerting them to ‘immediate action’. It was a false alarm; Hitler had not even set a date for the invasion of Britain. The real activity planned for that night was the launching of the whole of Germany’s bomber strength against Britain. That night two hundred bombers struck at London, and three hundred Londoners were killed. When on the following morning Churchill visited the ruins of an air-raid shelter in which forty people had been killed, the survivors and the relatives of the dead almost overwhelmed him as he got out of his car, calling out: ‘We thought you’d come. We can take it. Give it ’em back.’
Ismay, who was with Churchill, later wrote to him, recalling the incident, ‘You broke down completely.’ As he tried to get Churchill back to his car through the throng, a woman called out: ‘You see, he really cares, he’s crying.’ Returning to Downing Street, Churchill was told of an Enigma decrypt which made clear that the German invasion plans were so ill-advanced that even the training was not complete, and that there had been no ‘hard and fast decision to take action in any particular direction’. Relieved, but not lulled into complacency, he at once suggested bombing raids on German port facilities at Calais, Boulogne and other ports in which final invasion preparations would have to be made, to ‘affect the morale’ of German troops being assembled there, and to make unusable as many as possible of the 1,700 self-propelled barges and two hundred sea-going ships that had been spotted there by photographic reconnaissance.
As the Blitz continued, London’s weekly death toll rose to almost a thousand. On September 11 Churchill broadcast words of stern defiance, telling his listeners:
These cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings of London are, of course, a part of Hitler’s invasion plans. He hopes, by killing large numbers of civilians, and women and children, that he will terrorise and cow the people of this mighty imperial city, and make them a burden and anxiety to the Government and thus distract our attention unduly from the ferocious onslaught he is preparing. Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibre of the Londoners, whose forebears played a leading part in the establishment of Parliamentary institutions and who have been bred to value freedom far above their lives.
This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatreds, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous Island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe, and until the Old World—and the New—can join hands to rebuild the temples of man’s freedom and man’s honour, upon foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.
On September 13, as the German bombing of London intensified, the War Cabinet and the Defence Committee met in specially fortified rooms below ground level. Known then as the Central War Rooms, later as the Cabinet War Rooms, they were situated under the old Board of Trade building opposite St James’s Park, a substantial structure built just before the First World War. That such a sanctuary was needed became clear two days later, September 15, when, during the course of the day, a total of 230 bombers and 700 fighters crossed the coast and made for London.
It was a Sunday; by mid-morning, as the first wave of incoming aircraft was reported, it was clear that a major aerial assault had begun. Shortly before midday Churchill drove from Chequers with Clementine and his daughter-in-law Pamela to the headquarters of No. 11 Group at Uxbridge, to follow the course of the air battle. The Group Controller in the underground operations room when he arrived was Wing Commander Eric Douglas-Jones. It was the moment of crisis; at one point Churchill said to Douglas-Jones: ‘Good Lord, man, all your forces are in the air. What do we do now?’ Had one more wave of German bombers and fighters crossed the coast, there would have been no reserves to challenge them. Douglas-Jones gave a confident reply, ‘Well, Sir, we can just hope that the squadrons will refuel as quickly as possible and get up again.’
Another wave of German bombers and fighters crossed the coast. Every light bulb on Douglas-Jones’ panel showed red: every available fighter was in the air engaging the enemy. Turning to Air Vice-Marshal Park, Churchill asked, ‘What other reserves have we?’
‘There are none,’ Park replied.
The all-clear sounded at 3.50. As he left the operations room, Churchill patted the Controller on the shoulder and said, ‘Well done, Douglas-Jones.’ Pamela Churchill later recalled how, as they drove back to Chequers, ‘He was absolutely—totally—exhausted. It was as if he had personally repulsed the German bombers.’ Reaching Chequers half an hour later, Churchill put on the black satin eye-band that he used when in need of a nap, and fell asleep.
By eight o’clock that evening, when Churchill woke, it was clear, not only that the Germans had failed to overwhelm the British fighter defences, but that their losses had been so high, with fifty-nine of their bombers destroyed, that any further air battles on that scale would cripple them. The Battle of Britain, whose ‘day’ is now celebrated on September 15, had been won. The German bombing continued, but henceforth the British defenders gained each day in confidence and strength.
As 10 Downing Street itself was now reported to be unsafe, Churchill, his wife and his staff moved on September 16 to a set of rooms in the Board of Trade building. These rooms were not underground, as were the Central War Rooms, but above ground level, overlooking St James’s Park; they had been fortified inside with steel girders and outside with steel shutters to be closed whenever an air raid began. Known as ‘No. 10 Annexe’, this set of rooms, one of which Churchill turned into a map room, became his working headquarters for the rest of the war. There he ate and there he slept; he is known to have gone underground to sleep on only three nights.
‘We have now through the dark hours a tremendous firing of guns of all types,’ Captain Berkeley wrote in his diary on September 17. ‘For this we have to thank the PM, who stamped and shouted a week ago that something must be done or morale would crack. The searchlights had proved quite useless and people were getting desperate listening to the buzzing of the Boche wandering unopposed in the London sky. So the guns were brought in.’
On September 17, a day after moving into No. 10 Annexe, Churchill told the Commons, ‘I feel as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow that we shall be victorious.’ No military or civilian setback was to shake Churchill’s confidence. But each day’s news continued to be severe; that day in North Africa, Italian troops crossed the Libyan border and advanced sixty miles into Egypt. At sea, seventy-seven children being evacuated to Canada and seventy-two of the adults and crew accompanying them had been drowned when their ship, the City of Benares, was torpedoed.
Over London, on the night of September 16, the Germans had begun a vicious form of indiscriminate bombing, dropping mines by parachute. These mines drifted to the ground without any possibility of being directed on to a military or strategic target. More parachute mines were dropped on the night of September 18; on the following day Colville noted in his diary that Churchill was ‘becoming less and less benevolent towards the Germans, having been much moved by the examples of their frightfulness in Wandsworth which he has been to see, and talks about castrating the lot!’
***
For two months the first British offensive of Churchill’s Premiership had been under preparation: an attack, on behalf of General de Gaulle and his Free French Movement, against the French West African port of Dakar. Churchill’s hope was that the French authorities at Dakar would abandon their loyalty to Vichy and switch to de Gaulle, giving the Free French their first overseas success. ‘General de Gaulle’s preparations for installing himself in West Africa must be aided in every way,’ Churchill had told the Chiefs of Staff, who agreed with him, after some initial hesitation, that British troops should lead the assault. On September 15, learning that Vichy warships had reinforced the garrison at Dakar, Churchill called off the enterprise, but at the War Cabinet two days later both Chamberlain and Eden were emphatic that the attack should go ahead. As with so many wartime enterprises, Churchill was later to be accused of a lack of caution which was the opposite of his actual view at the time.
The attack, launched on September 23, was a failure. The Vichy forces resisted tenaciously, their gunners hitting the British battleship Resolution and the cruiser Cumberland. The expedition was called off. Churchill, though dismayed, was unbowed; that night, after ordering a hundred heavy bombers to attack Berlin, and a further fifty to strike at German barges and other installations in the Channel ports, he told Colville: ‘Let ’em have it. Remember this. Never maltreat the enemy by halves.’