On Germany’s side of the Rhine, the Führer had assembled 136 divisions and their reserves—two million men, including a contingent wearing uniforms of the Netherlands army and fluent in the Dutch language. The Low Countries would be overwhelmed by vast surging waves of infantry and armor “unprecedented for size, concentration, mobility,” Shirer wrote, which “stretched in three columns back for a hundred miles beyond the Rhine.”²⁵²

The Führer’s bold strategy deployed three great formations, one of which was meant to persuade the Allies that the Germans were following the Schlieffen Plan of 1914. In the north, the thirty divisions of Army Group B would strike into Holland and Belgium in a four-pronged assault. To meet what they were meant to think was the main threat, the best British and French troops would rush into Belgium, taking a stand along the Dyle River. In the south, Army Group C’s nineteen divisions would feint toward the Maginot Line, keeping the poilus there tied up. The real Nazi blow would be delivered in the center, by Army Group A—forty-five divisions, including most of the Wehrmacht’s panzers. Plunging through Luxembourg and the Ardennes, these motorized units would pour through the gap between the Maginot Line and the line of the Dyle, race westward to the Channel, and then pivot northward, joining Army Group B in the encirclement and destruction of the French and British troops.

Thus, the main body of the German army, cutting across the Allied rear, and using the panzers as it had in Poland, would exploit the new concept in warfare—deep penetration into enemy territory by mobile armored forces—a concept as revolutionary, Liddell Hart has pointed out, as “the use of the horse, the long spear, the phalanx, the flexible legion, the ‘oblique order,’ the horse-archer, the longbow, the musket, the [artillery] gun.”²⁵³

On May 9, in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf, Colonel Oster of the Abwehr dined for the last time with his friend Colonel Sas, the Dutch military attaché. Oster once more confirmed that Fall Gelb would be unleashed at daybreak. To double-check, he drove them to OKW’s Berlin headquarters in the Bendlerstrasse after their coffee and brandy. Sas waited in the car while the Abwehr colonel inquired within. Returning, Oster said there had been no changes. He added: “Das Schwein ist zur Westfront”—“The swine [Hitler] has gone to the Western Front.” They parted. Sas passed the new information to the Belgian military attaché, then crossed to his own legation and called The Hague to transmit, in simple code, the message: “Tomorrow at dawn!”²⁵⁴

At 10:20 that Thursday morning, when Chamberlain was offering the prime ministry of England to Halifax, Paul Reynaud announced that he would present the premiership of France to anyone who could form a government, unless his cabinet agreed with his indictment of Gamelin, commander in chief of the French army; supreme commander of the Allied forces, British as well as French; and the officer who presided over both the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre and the Haut Comité Militaire. This was not Reynaud’s first attempt to sack him—nor was Reynaud the first to try—but it was by far the most vigorous. The premier, though suffering a sore throat, spent over two hours reading his presentment. French military appointments were determined to a remarkable degree by an officer’s politics and religion, and Gamelin had been a beneficiary of that drôle system, having served as France’s senior soldier for five years. Afterward, after the calamitous spring of 1940, he and his officers bitterly complained that the Chamber of Deputies never gave them the arms to fight with. An audit revealed that each year Gamelin returned appropriations unspent—as much as 60 percent of his budget. He hated allies because they entailed the possibility of bloodshed, and would go to great lengths to avoid a fight, but the last straw, for Reynaud, had been the Norwegian operation. Gamelin had exercised none of his powers as supreme commander, and the first French force of any size—two demibrigades of Chasseurs Alpins and a third of foreign legionnaires—had not arrived in Norway until April 27, when the issue had already been decided. It is extraordinary to reflect that his name was never mentioned in newspaper accounts of the struggle there, never raised during the two-day debate in the House. He had participated in the plan to mine Norwegian waters. When the Germans swooped down on Norway, Reynaud had asked what he proposed to do. Mine the waters, Gamelin replied; that was the plan, and he meant to carry it out. The sudden appearance of the Germans was, to him, irrelevant.

Paul Baudouin, who kept the minutes, noted that throughout most of the premier’s arraignment of the country’s most prestigious military figure the cabinet observed “un silence total. Personne ne dit mot.” As Reynaud went on and on, piling up his case, one minister whispered to another, “C’est une exécution.” At 12:30 P.M. Reynaud finished, commenting that if France continued with such a supreme commander, she was sure to lose the war. The minister of finance was convinced, he said, of “l’impossibilité de laisser le général Gamelin à la tête des armées françaises.”²⁵⁵

Everyone turned to Daladier. He was minister of defense; he had defended Gamelin in the past. This was not the Daladier who had once been ready to fight for Czechoslovakia. He was defeatist now, infected with the spiritual corruption which had infected the government, the army, and virtually the entire infrastructure of French society. Replying to the premier, he blamed the British for the failure in Norway. Gamelin, he said, bore no share of the responsibility. He believed Gamelin was “un grand chef militaire,” a soldier with tremendous prestige and a fine military record. Everyone acknowledged his superior intelligence. True, he was seventy, but he was more active than many men his age. Daladier opposed “the desire of the premier to replace the generalissimo.”²⁵⁶

Reynaud appealed to other ministers to speak up. Surely they had formed opinions; duty required that they voice them. But these were frightened little men. If one took a position, one might offend a powerful figure; by remaining silent, one lost nothing. Reynaud, however, wasn’t going to let them off that easily. Their failure to speak, he said, meant they opposed him; since the government could not survive such a loss of confidence, therefore, “I consider the government as having resigned.” They were dismayed. None had thought he would actually dissolve the government. Now they were all ex-ministers, as he was an ex-premier.²⁵⁷

During the afternoon Gamelin, glooming around in his Vincennes dungeon, learned of the bill of particulars Reynaud had drawn up against him. Indignant, he resigned.

At 1:00 A.M. he was awakened. A French agent behind the German lines had sent an urgent signal: “Colonnes en marche vers l’ouest”—“Columns marching westward.”

Hitler was on his way.

France had no government. The French army had no commander.

The telephones began ringing in Whitehall as the first olive moments of daybreak revealed the majestic buildings towering against a darkling, still starry sky—vast cathedrals of an empire whose celebrants had been dwindling year by year since what had been called, and was now known to be, the Armistice.

Shortly after 5:30 A.M. Churchill was wakened and told the first, fragmentary reports. Before the mists of legend envelop him, before he comes to power and assumes leadership of the struggle to crush the monster in central Europe—while he is still, so to speak, Drake bowling when informed that the Armada has been sighted—it is useful to glimpse the entirely mortal Winston. The vision is less than inspiring; unlike some earlier heroes, Winston is engaged in no mundane but memorable act when the news arrives. Instead, wearing his blue dressing gown and carpet slippers, he stumbles down to the upper war room and is told that thus far the attack is “on Holland alone.” Assuming, like everyone else in His Majesty’s Government, that the main Nazi thrust will come here, he phones Charles Corbin, the French ambassador. He asks: Will the Allied armies move into Belgium on the strength of the little now known?

At 6:20 Corbin called back. German troops were now across the Belgian border, he said, and Brussels had “asked for help.” Therefore, Gamelin had been told to invoke Plan D—the advance of the French Seventh Army and the British Expeditionary Force to the line of the Dyle River, there to join the Belgian and Dutch forces. Randolph Churchill, breakfasting in his camp, had heard a radio bulletin. He phoned his father, asking: “What’s happening?” Winston replied: “Well, the German hordes are pouring into the Low Countries.” He told him of the Allied countermove, adding, “In a day or two there will be a head-on collision.” His son asked him about his reference the previous evening to “you becoming Prime Minister today.” Churchill said, “Oh, I don’t know about that. Nothing matters now except beating the enemy.”²⁵⁸

In this crisis Sam Hoare and Oliver Stanley, the other two service ministers, appeared with their chief advisers at Admiralty House. Later Hoare would remember, “We had had little or no sleep, and the news could not be worse, yet there he was, smoking his large cigar and eating fried eggs and bacon, as if he had just returned from an early morning ride.” He was surrounded by yesterday’s newspapers. The Times leader that morning rebuked Labour for dividing the House, since it had been obvious that Chamberlain intended to rebuild his cabinet when “the Labour Party ran up its flag,” throwing the prime minister’s plans “into confusion.” The News Chronicle—which had championed Lloyd George—more accurately reported that since neither Liberal nor Labour leaders were willing to serve under Chamberlain, “a new Premier will thus have to be found. He is more likely to be found in Mr Winston Churchill than anyone else.” Winston swept the papers to the floor with one vigorous arm, rose, and suggested they meet in the war room downstairs. There, with him in the chair, they agreed that two RAF squadrons should be sent to France “in accordance with the prearranged plan.” Then orders to execute Royal Marine, his plan to mine the waters of the Rhine, were issued at long last.²⁵⁹

The first casualty of the Nazi offensive was the feud between Reynaud and Gamelin. The premier sent Vincennes a message: “The battle has begun. Only one thing counts: to win it.” Gamelin agreed, replying: “Seule la France compte”—“Only France counts.” His Majesty’s Government, preoccupied with its own political crisis, had known nothing of the impasse in Paris. It had little meaning now anyway; what mattered was news of the enemy’s penetration. Minute by minute information was accumulating. German paratroopers had landed in Belgium, the Luftwaffe was bombing airfields in France and the Low Countries, and the British and French were marching into Belgium—the last thing, we now know, that they should have done. The Führer’s Army Group B had their undivided attention. Nothing much was happening to Army Group C, holding the frontier opposite the Maginot Line, and nothing was known of Rundstedt’s Army Group A. Allied intelligence wasn’t even aware that it was by far the largest, dwarfing the other two.²⁶⁰

During the night the first of Rundstedt’s tanks had negotiated the mine-fields near the German-Belgian border, and at daybreak three panzer corps were driving hard, intent upon maneuvering through the wooded ravines of the Ardennes and crossing the Meuse near Sedan in forty-eight hours. Even the few French officers who doubted that the Ardennes were impénétrable believed the enemy could not possibly reach the river in less than ten days, by which time reinforcements could be brought up to dig in along the Meuse, swift and narrow, running between steep banks and therefore easy to defend. Yet already Rundstedt’s armor had easily thrown aside the defense behind the mines—a thin screen of French cavalry, backed by light motorized forces. Thus, while the Allied right wing remained idle in the bowels of the troglodytic Maginot Line, and the left advanced toward what was expected to be the decisive encounter, the center was already gravely threatened. In the confusion of their rout the officers there neglected to send the bad news winging to Vincennes, La Ferté, or Montry. The fox was among the chickens, but the farmer, out in the pasture, didn’t even know he had a problem.

At No. 10 the first of the War Cabinet’s three meetings that day began with the Chiefs of Staff present. They were dazed, in the state of confusion which was the first reaction to blitzkriegs. Reports were accumulating faster than they could be skimmed. H.M.S. Kelly had been torpedoed off the Belgian coast. The Wehrmacht was in Luxembourg. Nazi paratroops had been dropped at three strategic locations, in the area between The Hague and Leiden, and near Rotterdam; Nancy had been bombed; the Luftwaffe was dropping magnetic mines in the Scheldt to disrupt Dutch and Belgian shipping. Churchill, the ministers were relieved to hear, had already sent sweeping gear to clear it.²⁶¹

According to Reith’s diary, Chamberlain “did not refer to Amery or any of the other Conservatives who had attacked him. He was in good form; the news from the Low Countries had stimulated him”; the German invasions had found him “ready for action if encouraged and authorized to act.” He was a new man; he told his sister many of those who had voted against him had written to say “they had nothing against me except that I had the wrong people in my team.” He had, indeed, convinced himself that in this crisis the country would be much better off if he remained as prime minister. Halifax noted in his diary: “The P.M. told the Cabinet… that he thought all would have to wait until the war situation was calmer.” Privately he told his foreign secretary that “he had a feeling that Winston did not approve of the delay, and left me guessing as to what he meant to do.”²⁶²

Reith’s diary, which is confirmed by Eden’s, notes that the prime minister had seen Attlee and Greenwood and understood that they were prepared to defer the political crisis, though the final decision would have to be made in Bournemouth. Hoare later wrote: “Chamberlain’s first inclination was to withhold his resignation until the French battle was finished.” Nicolson and his friends were among the outsiders who learned of this, and they were aghast. One of them phoned Salisbury, who replied, wrote Nicolson, “that we must maintain our point of view, namely that Winston should be made Prime Minister during the course of the day.”²⁶³

Churchill’s feelings about Chamberlain’s switch of mood can only be imagined, but anxiety must have been among them. He was somewhat reassured by Kingsley Wood. At about 10:00 A.M. Wood once more crossed the Horse Guards Parade to report, as Winston later wrote, that the prime minister “was inclined to feel that the great battle which had broken upon us made it necessary for him to remain at his post.” Hoare had encouraged him in this, but Wood’s emphatic comment—which Horace Wilson, embittered, later damned as an act of “betrayal”—was that “on the contrary, the new crisis made it all the more necessary to have a National Government, which alone could confront it.” Wood, wrote Churchill, had told him that Chamberlain had “accepted this view.” But that was not the end of it. Shortly before the second meeting of the War Cabinet, at 11:00 A.M., Simon approached Eden and Hankey. He told them, Eden wrote, that he had heard that “despite the attacks in Flanders, Churchill was pressing for early changes in the Government.” Simon was “indignant,” but Hankey commented “quietly and firmly: ‘Personally, I think that if there are to be changes, the sooner they are made the better.’ ”²⁶⁴

At this second meeting Winston pointed out that Roger Keyes was a close personal friend of the Belgian king; the admiral was eager to serve his country and might be useful in Brussels. The War Cabinet approved. The ministers were also pleased to learn that Churchill had given instructions “for the removal of the gold still left in Holland.” They were less enthusiastic when Winston, explaining, “It won’t take a minute,” insisted that the war wait while they watch the Prof, who was sitting at a side table, demonstrate an antiaircraft homing fuse. According to Reith, “Ironside, very snotty,” whispered to him, “Do you think this is the time for showing off toys?” This shirtiness sounds more like Reith than Ironside, who, noting the incident in his diary the following day, wrote of Churchill: “I have seldom met anybody with stranger gaps of knowledge or whose mind worked in greater jerks. Will it be possible to make it work in orderly fashion? On this much depends.”²⁶⁵

During this second meeting of the War Cabinet, Chamberlain had continued to be very much the prime minister. Despite his assurance to Kingsley Wood he made no reference to surrendering his seals. Actually, the crucial decision could not be made by any member of His Majesty’s Government. It rested with the men in Bournemouth; Chamberlain had agreed to abide by their finding. Labour’s national executive, meeting in a basement room of the Highcliff Hotel, resolved that the party was “prepared to take our share of the responsibility, as a full partner, in a new Government, which, under a new Prime Minister, commands the confidence of the nation.” Dalton was responsible for inserting “under a new Prime Minister.” Some of the others doubted its necessity. He told them: “If you don’t make it absolutely plain, the Old Man will still hang on.” Attlee and Greenwood were about to drive to London with the signed document when the prime minister’s private secretary phoned from Downing Street to ask whether Labour had reached a decision. Attlee read the resolution over the telephone.²⁶⁶

It was now 5:00 P.M. The War Cabinet’s third meeting of the day had begun a half-hour earlier. The private secretary entered the Cabinet Room and handed the typewritten transcript of Labour’s verdict to Horace Wilson, who read it and wordlessly slipped it in front of the prime minister. Chamberlain glanced at it and continued with his agenda. The Germans had bombed a dozen objectives and had dropped incendiaries in Kent; the Rotterdam airfield was in the hands of the Nazis, who were landing troop-carrying aircraft there; six Blenheims had been sent to intercept the troop carriers and five of them had been lost; the BEF had reached the line of the Dyle. After a lengthy discussion the ministers decided not to bomb the Ruhr. More paratroopers had landed in Belgium and the ministers decided to warn British troops in the United Kingdom “against parachutists attempting to land in this country.” Then Chamberlain came to the last item on his agenda: the political situation.²⁶⁷

He read the Labour resolution aloud and said that “in the light of this answer” he had decided that he should “at once” tender his resignation to the King. It would be “convenient,” he suggested, for the new prime minister to assume that “all members of the War Cabinet” were placing their resignations at his disposal, though there was no need “for this to be confirmed in writing.” The minutes of the meeting ended: “The War Cabinet agreed to the course suggested.” He had not told them whom he preferred as his successor, nor had he mentioned his meeting with Halifax and Churchill the day before. He proposed “to see the King this evening”—that was all.²⁶⁸

Actually, the prime minister, in his last act as prime minister, was on his way to the palace in less than half an hour. In his diary George VI recorded how he saw Chamberlain “after tea. I accepted his resignation, & told him how grossly unfairly I thought he had been treated, & that I was terribly sorry.” They then talked informally about his successor. “I, of course, suggested Halifax,” His Majesty wrote, “but he told me that H was not enthusiastic, as being in the Lords he could only act as a shadow or a ghost in the Commons, where all the real work took place.” His royal host was “disappointed… as I thought H was the obvious man.” Before the former prime minister could mention another name, George “knew that there was only one other person whom I could send for to form a Government… & that was Winston.” He said so; Chamberlain confirmed his judgment. The King “thanked him for all his help to me, and repeated that I would greatly regret my loss at not having him as my P.M. I sent for Winston & asked him to form a Government.”²⁶⁹

They didn’t get to it straightaway. The monarch enjoyed a bit of regal byplay first. “His Majesty received me most graciously,” wrote Churchill, “and bade me sit down. He looked at me searchingly and quizzically for some moments, and then said: ‘I suppose you don’t know why I have sent for you?’ Adopting his mood, I replied: ‘Sir, I simply couldn’t imagine why.’ He laughed and said: ‘I want you to form a Government.’ I said I would certainly do so.” Since the King had made no stipulation about the government being national in character—apparently Chamberlain had not mentioned this, an unaccountable lapse—Winston felt his commission “was in no formal way dependent upon this point. But in view of all that had happened, and the conditions which had led to Mr. Chamberlain’s resignation, a Government of national character was obviously inherent in the situation.” However, if he failed to come to terms with the Liberal and Labour parties, he believed, “I should not have been constitutionally debarred from trying to form the strongest Government possible of all who would stand by the country in the hour of peril, provided that such a Government could command a majority in the House of Commons.”²⁷⁰

He told the King that he would “immediately send for the leaders of the Labour and Liberal Parties, that I proposed to form a War Cabinet of five or six Ministers, and that I hoped to let him have at least five or six names before midnight.” On this he took his leave. His sole companion was his bodyguard, W. H. Thompson. As Thompson later recalled, their ride back to Admiralty House was made “in complete silence,” but as the new prime minister was leaving the car he asked: “You know why I have been to Buckingham Palace, Thompson?” The former Scotland Yard inspector said he did and congratulated him, adding, “I only wish the position had come your way in better times, for you have an enormous task.” Churchill’s eyes filled. He said: “God alone knows how great it is. I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is. We can only do our best.”²⁷¹

While Churchill had been with the King, Randolph found a message in the adjutant’s office asking him to phone the Admiralty. He did, and asked why he was wanted. The private secretary in the private office replied: “Only just to say that your father has gone to the Palace and when he comes back he will be Prime Minister.”²⁷²

Early in the evening Attlee, accompanied by Greenwood, called on Churchill. They talked easily; during the eleven years before the war’s outbreak, Winston had crossed swords with the Conservative and national governments far more often than with Labour. He proposed that Labour should have “rather more than a third of the places, having two seats on the War Cabinet of five, or it might be six.” He asked Attlee for a list of names—they could then discuss “particular offices”—and mentioned Labour MPs he admired: Morrison, Dalton, Ernest Bevin, and A. V. Alexander.²⁷³

As they conferred, Harold Nicolson was on his way to King’s Bench Walk, passing posters saying “BRUSSELS BOMBED,” “PARIS BOMBED,” “LYONS BOMBED,” “SWISS RAILWAYS BOMBED.” That evening he joined his wife at Sissinghurst, their home forty miles southeast of London. They dined together and “just before nine, we turn on the wireless and it begins to buzz as the juice comes through and then we hear the bells”—the BBC identification signal. “Then the pips sound 9.0 and the announcer begins: ‘This is the Home Service. Here is the Right Honourable Neville Chamberlain M.P., who will make a statement.’ I am puzzled by this for a moment, and then realise that he has resigned.” Addressing the nation, the fallen prime minister told the people that the events of the past few days had shown that a coalition government was necessary, and since the only obstacle to such a coalition was himself he had resigned. The King had “asked my friend and colleague, Mr. Winston Churchill, to form a truly National Government.” For the moment, acting ministers “will carry on.” He himself had agreed to serve under Churchill. Nicolson noted: “He ends with a fierce denunciation of the Germans for invading Holland and Belgium. It is a magnificent statement, and all the hatred I have felt for Chamberlain subsides as if a piece of bread were dropped into a glass of champagne.”²⁷⁴

“Thus,” wrote Winston, “at the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State…. As I went to bed at about 3 A.M., I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene.” He felt, he said,

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. Eleven years in the political wilderness had freed me from ordinary party antagonisms. My warnings over the last six years had been so numerous, so detailed, and were now so terribly vindicated, that no one could gainsay me. I could not be reproached either for making the war or with want of preparation for it…. Therefore, although impatient for the morning, I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.²⁷⁵

Labour endorsed the decision of its leaders to support Churchill by a lopsided vote: 2,450,000 to 170,000—a 93 percent victory—and when a pacifist MP demanded a division of the House on the question of whether Churchill should be prime minister, the vote was 380 to 0, the pacifist presumably abstaining. Winston possessed one great advantage which no other eminent parliamentarian could claim; as the historian Cyril Falls puts it, “His record was completely clean and satisfactory in those years when the Government had been hiding its head in the sand and… simultaneously voting against every attempt to arm the British forces.” But his mood had not yet been synchronized with that of the powerful, including his sovereign. In his diary entry the following day—Saturday, May 11—the King noted: “I cannot yet think of Winston as P.M…. I met Halifax in the garden”—the noble lord had been granted permission to walk through the palace garden en route from his Belgravia flat to the Foreign Office—“and told him I was sorry not to have him as P.M.” George still felt uncomfortable with Winston. There was a generational gap between them. When they had first met in 1912 Winston was first lord of the Admiralty and the future monarch a young naval cadet. By normal reckoning Winston’s political career ought to have ended ten years earlier. He had turned sixty-five the previous November; five months before he became prime minister he had been eligible to draw an old-age pension. Indeed, he was to be the senior statesman of the war—four years older than Stalin, eight years older than Roosevelt, nine years older than Mussolini, fifteen years older than Hitler. The King also liked Tories to be orthodox, conventional, loyal party men, and Churchill was none of those.²⁷⁶

That same Saturday, Margot Asquith, writing a letter to Geoffrey Dawson at The Times, told how, on impulse, she had taken a taxi to No.10 the previous evening; she had looked at Chamberlain’s “spare figure and keen eye and could not help comparing it with Winston’s self-indulgent rotundity.” R. A. Butler called Churchill “a half-breed American.” And that evening young Colville, at No. 10, wrote in his diary: “There seems to be some inclination in Whitehall to believe that Winston will be a complete failure and that Neville will return.” Long afterward Colville observed: “Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with the Establishment… so dubious of the choice and so prepared to have its doubts justified.” Only a month earlier Eden’s followers in Parliament had outnumbered Churchill’s and some of Winston’s closest friends preferred Lloyd George as an alternative to Chamberlain.²⁷⁷

Among the general public it was different. Even so, the News Chronicle had reported that according to an opinion poll, his principal support was among “those in the lower income groups, those between 21 and 30, and among men.” A prime minister should enjoy broader approval, particularly among the sophisticated, and a Conservative prime minister, in the House of Commons, ought to receive more cheers from Tory benches than from Labour. In his May 13 diary entry Nicolson noted: “When Chamberlain enters the House, he gets a terrific reception, and when Churchill comes in the applause is less. Winston sits there between Chamberlain and Attlee”—Attlee was now lord privy seal and, in effect, deputy prime minister—“[and then] makes a very short statement, but to the point.” The only tribute to the new prime minister came from Lloyd George, who spoke of his “glittering intellectual gifts, his dauntless courage, his profound study of war, and his experience in its operation and direction.” Winston wept.²⁷⁸

What Nicolson called Churchill’s “very short statement” and Geoffrey Dawson described patronizingly as “quite a good little warlike speech from Winston” included five words now known to millions who were unborn at the time, who have never seen England, and do not even speak English.

I would say to the House,

as I have said to those who have joined this Government:

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”…

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 God can give us….

That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim?

I can answer in one word: It is victory,

victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror,

victory however long and hard the road may be;

for without victory, there is no survival.²⁷⁹

The mighty Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, with its garrison of 1,200, fell on Saturday, May 11, the second day of the great Nazi offensive, captured by only 78 parachute-engineers led by a lieutenant. Landing in gliders on the unguarded roof, they blew up the armored cupolas and casemates of the fort’s guns with a new, highly intensive explosive kept secret until now. Belgian frontier guards were prepared to blow up the bridges of the King Albert Canal, blocking the Nazi advance, but another small Nazi detachment, dropping silently out of the night sky, massacred them. In Holland the French Seventh Army engaged the Germans and was flung back. Liège fell to blond young Nazis shouting “Heil Hitler!” as they threw their bodies on the muzzles of Belgian machine guns, sacrificing themselves to maintain the blitzkrieg’s momentum. On Tuesday, Rotterdam was the target of a massive Luftwaffe terror attack; thousands of 2,200-pound delayed-action bombs gutted the center of the city, destroyed 25,000 houses, and left 78,000 civilians homeless and a thousand dead. Rotterdam capitulated. The Dutch commander in chief surrendered his entire army. Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government fled to London.

That was the small shock. The great shock came in barely coherent dispatches from the Meuse. Guderian, leading mechanized spearheads of Rundstedt’s army group, had been racing through Luxembourg and Belgium’s Luxembourg Province. After rocking and tilting and pivoting their way through a seven-mile stretch of the Ardennes—they had been elaborately rehearsed in the Black Forest—these forces had entered France Sunday, right on schedule. Before Churchill had completed the formation of his cabinet, the Germans had seven tank divisions on the Meuse near Sedan. The heights on the far side of the Meuse were forbidding. The French had rushed heavy artillery there, and after firing a few rounds at the panzers, the artillery officer predicted that the Nazis would try to cross elsewhere. But the Germans had rehearsed this, too, and Rundstedt was a master at integrating his commands, including the use of tactical air. At first light on Monday, Stukas and low-level bombers began pounding the French batteries; by 4:00 P.M. every field piece, every enemy howitzer on the heights, had been destroyed. Nazi rubber boats reached the far shore unmolested; beachheads were established; pontoon bridges spanned the river, then heavy bridges—and finally, lumbering and growling, German tanks.

French tanks appeared to challenge them. They were superior to the Germans’ in design and armament, and history’s first great tank battle seemed imminent. But the outcome, to use a word that was on everyone’s lips that week, was une débâcle. The French tank commanders weren’t to blame. Their high command, having ruled that armor was to be used only in support of infantry, had gone to extraordinary lengths to discourage attacks by armored formations. The installation of radios in turrets had been forbidden. The French drivers, assembled from different units and unable to communicate with one another, could not coordinate a counterattack. In two hours Guderian’s panzers had blown up fifty of them. The rest fled. Among the frustrated Frenchmen was Colonel de Gaulle. To his astonishment, dismay, and effroi, he saw shuffling mobs of poilus without weapons. The Germans had no time to take prisoners; they had disarmed the men and left them to blunder about. Meantime, the panzers had made a second crossing of the Meuse at Dinant. German armor was now pouring across the river. In Vincennes, however, concerned French officials calling upon Généralissime Gamelin found him still confident. He did ask if they had any news of the fighting. Apparently all the dispatches sent to him had gone astray.

Guderian’s tanks had reached Montcornet, less than fifteen miles from Laon; they were plunging down the valley of the Somme toward Abbeville on the English Channel. Aghast, the Allied forces in Belgium, including the BEF, realized that the great German scythe slicing across France was slicing behind them. Already they were cut off from the main French armies in the south. On the nineteenth Reynaud dismissed Gamelin from all commands; his predecessor, seventy-three-year-old Maxime Weygand, was brought out of retirement to take over, but Weygand was helpless; events were beyond his control; the Nazis seemed to be everywhere, and everywhere victorious. Thus, only a few days after their advance into Belgium, the French and British divisions in the north disengaged and retreated behind the line of the Scheldt. Lord Gort was poring over a map, studying routes to the Channel ports, where the Germans planned to turn the last key in the last lock.

On May 19, Churchill addressed the nation over the BBC:

I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister

in a solemn hour for the life of our country,

of our Empire, of our Allies,

and above all of the cause of freedom.

A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders.

The Germans, by a remarkable combination

of air bombing and heavily armoured tanks,

have broken through the French defences

north of the Maginot Line,

And strong columns of their armoured vehicles

are ravaging the open country,

which for the first day or two

was without defenders.

They have penetrated deeply

and spread alarm and confusion in their track.

Behind them there are now appearing

infantry in lorries,

and behind them, again,

the large masses are moving forward.

He had received, he said, “the most sacred pledges” from the leaders of the French Republic, “and in particular from its indomitable Prime Minister, M. Reynaud… that whatever happens they will fight to the end, be it bitter or glorious.” Then, a typical Churchill touch: “Nay, if we fight to the end, it can only be glorious.”

Since receiving the King’s commission, he told the country, he had formed a government “of men and women… of almost every point of view.

We have differed and quarreled in the past;

but now one bond unites us all—

to wage war until victory is won,

and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame,

whatever the cost and agony may be.

If this is one of the most awe-striking periods

in the long history of France and Britain,

it is also, beyond doubt, the most sublime.

Side by side… the British and French peoples have advanced

to rescue not only Europe but mankind

from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny

which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history.

Behind them, behind us—

behind the armies of Britain and France—

gather a group of shattered states and bludgeoned races:

the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians,

the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians—

Upon all of whom a long night of barbarism will descend

unbroken even by a star of hope,

unless we conquer, as conquer we must;

as conquer we shall.²⁸⁰

Despite the “most sacred pledges” from Paris, the possibility loomed that France might not fight “to the end.” The leaders of a nation verging on collapse cannot commit their countrymen if the army can no longer defend them. In capitals around the world leaders and newspapers wondered whether, if France fell, England would also quit. The prime minister again went on the air, on June 18, the day after Pétain sued for peace, to discount such speculation—to vow that England would continue the battle alone:

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….

Hitler knows that he will have to break us on 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,

including all 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 perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties,

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.”²⁸¹

He had come to power because he had seen through Hitler from the very beginning—but not, ironically, because his inner light, the source of that insight, was understood by Englishmen. Churchill’s star was invisible to the public and even to most of his peers. But a few saw it. One of them wrote afterward that although Winston knew the world was complex and in constant flux, to him “the great things, races, and peoples, and morality were eternal.” Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher, later observed that the Churchill of 1940 was neither “a sensitive lens, which absorbs and concentrates and reflects… the sentiments of others,” nor a politician who played “on public opinion like an instrument.” Instead Berlin saw him as a leader who imposed his “imagination and his will upon his countrymen,” idealizing them “with such intensity that in the end they approached his ideal and began to see themselves as he saw them.” In doing so he “transformed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armour.”²⁸²

Churchill’s mood seemed to confirm this. He possessed an inner radiance that year and felt it. In his memoirs he wrote that “by the confidence, indulgence, and loyalty by which I was upborne, I was soon able to give an integral direction to almost every aspect of the war. This was really necessary because times were so very bad. The method was accepted because everyone realised how near were death and ruin. Not only individual death, which is the universal experience, stood near, but, incomparably more commanding, the life of Britain, her message, and her glory.”²⁸³

To him, Britain, “her message, and her glory,” were very real. At times he would address his country as though she were a personage. After he had comprehended the revolution wrought at Kitty Hawk he said (to the astonishment of his companion, who had thought they were alone), “You came into big things as an accident of naval power when you were an island. The world had confidence in you. You became the workshop of the world. You populated the island beyond its capacity. Through an accident of airpower you will probably cease to exist.” It sounded quaint, and it was. Churchill was not a public figure like, say, Roosevelt, who thought and spoke in the idiom of his own time. He was instead the last of England’s great Victorian statesmen, with views formed when the British lion’s roar could silence the world; he was the champion of the Old Queen’s realm and the defender and protector of the values Englishmen of her reign had cherished, the principles they held inviolate, the vision which had illumined their world, which had steadied them in time of travail, and which he had embraced as a youth.²⁸⁴

He was ever the impassioned Manichaean, seeing life and history in primary colors, like Vittore Carpaccio’s paintings of St. George; a believer in absolute virtue and absolute malevolence, in blinding light and impenetrable darkness, in righteousness and wickedness—or rather in the forces of good against the forces of evil, for the two would always be in conflict and be therefore forever embattled. He had been accused of inconsistency and capricious judgment. Actually, it was MacDonald and Baldwin and Chamberlain who tailored their views to fit the moment. Churchill’s binnacle remained true. “Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey,” he told the House of Commons; “hardship our garment, constancy and valour our only shield.”²⁸⁵

And, he might have added, grief as their reward. He was sure Britons could take it. Despite his high birth he had an almost mystical faith in the power of the ordinary Englishman to survive, to endure, and, in the end, to prevail. “Tell the truth to the British people,” he had begged the shifty prime ministers of the 1930s; “they are a tough people, a robust people…. If you have told them exactly what is going on you have ensured yourself against complaints and reproaches which are not very pleasant when they come home on the morrow of some disillusion.”²⁸⁶

But in those shabby years His Majesty’s Governments believed that there were some things the country ought not to know, and that their policy of duplicity—which at times amounted to conspiracy—would be vindicated in the end. Chamberlain would be the scapegoat of appeasement, and before the year was out sackcloth would be his shroud, but he was only one of many. Baldwin, for example, bore a greater responsibility for weakening Britain’s defenses while Hitler built his military juggernaut. The appeasers had been powerful; they had controlled The Times and the BBC; they had been largely drawn from the upper classes, and their betrayal of England’s greatness would be neither forgotten nor forgiven by those who, gulled by the mystique of England’s class system, had believed as Englishmen had believed for generations that public school boys governed best. The appeasers destroyed oligarchic rule which, though levelers may protest, had long governed well. If ever men betrayed their class, these were they.

Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, anti-Semitism, the Reich’s darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold all that had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, with the reins of power at last firm in his grasp, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.