He announced with pride—not pardonable, because he still distrusted the convoy policy—that “a week has passed since a British ship, alone or in convoy, has been sunk or even molested by a U-boat on the high seas,” and he closed with one of those passages which men in public life later wish could be expunged from the record. “Rough times lie ahead,” he said, “but how different is the scene from that of October 1914!” Then the French front “seemed to be about to break under the terrible impact of German Imperialism…. We faced those adverse conditions then; we have nothing worse to face tonight.”⁸⁹

They faced something far worse, of course, but no one can hold a mirror up to the future, and the speech was well received in England. The prime minister’s junior private secretary, Jock Colville, wrote in his diary that Churchill “certainly gives one confidence and will, I suspect, be Prime Minister before this war is over.” Colville thought he might “lead us into the most dangerous paths. But he is the only man in the country who commands anything like universal respect, and perhaps with age he has become less inclined to undertake rash adventures.” Hoare, another diarist, noted that Churchill seemed “very exhilarated” and that “the Press talked of him as Prime Minister.” It was not just the press; Sir John Wheeler-Bennett was among those establishmentarians who, listening to Winston, “first realized that Churchill was ‘the pilot of the storm’ who was needed to lead us through the crisis of the Second World War.” That thought did not occur to Neville Chamberlain, but he was impressed; to his sister he wrote that he took “the same view as Winston, to whose excellent broadcast we have just been listening. I believe Russia will always act as she thinks her own interests demand, and I cannot believe she would think her interests served by… German domination in the Balkans.”⁹⁰

In Berlin, William Shirer wrote: “The local enthusiasm for peace a little dampened today by Churchill’s speech last night.” Goebbels suppressed references to Winston’s comments on Russia, but his allusion to the Admiralty’s success in shielding merchantmen from Nazi submarines had touched a nerve. Led by Der Stürmer, Völkischer Beobachter, and Deutsches Nachtrichenbüro, the German press had made a great thing out of the U-boat campaign; U-boat captains were the toast of the Reich, and cartoonists had pictured Winston as a battered, cornered prizefighter and as a drowning man surrounded by periscopes. His announcement that the subs had let a week pass without a victory enraged Hans Fritzsche, director of the Nazi broadcasting services. Fritzsche interrupted a program to deliver a thirteen-minute polemic denouncing Winston, quoting him and then raging: “So that is what the dirty gangster thinks! Who does that filthy liar think he is fooling?… So Mr. Churchill—that bloated swine [aufgeblasenes Schwein]—spouts through his dirty teeth that in the last week no English ship has been molested by German submarines? He does, indeed?… There you have the twisted and diseased mind of this infamous profiteer and specialist in stinking lying. Naturally those British ships have not been molested; they have been sunk.”⁹¹

It is possible to be more overbearing in German than in any other tongue, but only if one has mastered it as Winston had mastered English. In any duel of denigration he was bound to leave Fritzsche far behind, and he did it in November, in his second wartime address over the BBC. Germany, he said, was more fragile than it seemed. He had

the sensation and also the conviction that that evil man over there and his cluster of confederates are not sure of themselves, as we are sure of ourselves; that they are harassed in their guilty souls by the thought and by the fear of an ever-approaching retribution for their crimes, and for the orgy of destruction in which they have plunged us all. As they look out tonight from their blatant, panoplied, clattering Nazi Germany, they cannot find one single friendly eye in the whole circumference of the globe. Not one!⁹²

Russia, he said, “returns them a flinty stare”; Italy “averts her gaze”; Japan “is puzzled and thinks herself betrayed”; Turkey, Islam, India, and China “would regard with undisguised dread a Nazi triumph, well knowing what their fate would soon be”; and the “great English-speaking Republic across the Atlantic makes no secret of its sympathies.” Thus “the whole world is against Hitler and Hitlerism. Men of every race and clime feel that this monstrous apparition stands between them and the forward move which is their due, and for which the age is ripe.” The “seething mass of criminality and corruption constituted by the Nazi Party machine” was responsible for the power of its führer, “a haunted, morbid being, who, to their eternal shame, the German people in their bewilderment have worshipped as a god.”⁹³

Jock Colville wrote that he had “listened to Winston Churchill’s wireless speech, very boastful, over-confident and indiscreet (especially about Italy and the U.S.A.), but certainly most amusing.” If Colville was condescending, Harold Nicolson sometimes turned his thumb down on a Churchill broadcast. After listening to one of the early radio addresses, Nicolson observed in his diary that Winston “is a little too rhetorical, and I do not think that his speech will really have gone down with the masses. He is too belligerent for this pacifist age, and although once anger comes to steel our sloppiness, his voice will be welcome to them, at the moment it reminds them of heroism which they do not really feel.”⁹⁴

One hesitates to gainsay Harold Nicolson; he was one of the shrewdest observers of his time, and his lapses were rare. But this may have been one of them. Nicolson, with Amery and Spears, was a member of the Eden group and continued to attend their Carlton meetings well into 1940. More important, he—like Colville—belonged to the upper class, and carried all its paraphernalia with him. His credentials as an analyst of “the masses” are therefore thin; as he himself acknowledged, he misinterpreted the feelings of his own constituents. Now that the issue with Hitler was joined and English blood was flowing, Churchill had become the most overstated member of His Majesty’s Government. Clearly that troubled Nicolson; men with his background prized understatement and recoiled from its opposite. Elsewhere on England’s social spectrum, however, that was not true. Among the middle and lower classes, pacifism had begun to fade when Hitler entered Prague, and once war was declared it was replaced by patriotism. Before the war became dreary and stale, the signs of the nation’s shift in mood had been unmistakable. The jubilant response to the naval victory off Montevideo had been one. Another had appeared when the people learned—from accounts of a Churchill speech in Parliament—that Luftwaffe pilots were machine-gunning the crews of unarmed fishing vessels and “describing on the radio what fun it was to see a little ship ‘crackling in flames like a Christmas tree.’ ” Winston was swamped with mail from clerks and miners, waitresses and small businessmen, demanding reprisals. Of course, he refused; he was a gentleman. But they weren’t, and they vastly outnumbered those who were.

There was talk—more out of Parliament than in it—of Churchill as prime minister. It was, and for thirty years had been, the only job which clearly suited him. That does not mean he was ineffectual elsewhere. He had always been able, and often brilliant, in other ministries, and even his Admiralty critics conceded that no other man in public life could match his performance in the private office. But given the broad reaches of his mind, his knowledge of the entire government, and his inability to hold his tongue in check, he often exasperated the cabinet by trespassing in departments which were the preserve of other men round the table. So it was in his BBC broadcasts. Although he began by confining himself to the war at sea, sooner or later he was bound to touch upon issues which could not be remotely construed as naval. If his touch had been light, the encroachment would have been ignored, but it was also characteristic of him that he was incapable of subtlety. His third major broadcast raised an issue which was clearly the special concern of the Foreign Office. He tore into Europe’s neutral nations. By now none could doubt that the German führer had plans for their future, yet like Scarlett O’Hara they seemed to be promising themselves they would think about it tomorrow, while every tomorrow darkened their prospects. In a BBC broadcast on January 20, 1940, Churchill said:

All of them hope that the storm will pass

before their turn comes to be devoured.

But I fear—I fear greatly—

the storm will not pass.

It will rage and it will roar,

ever more loudly, ever more widely.

It will spread to the South;

It will spread to the North.

There is no chance of a speedy end

except through united action;

And if at any time, Britain and France,

wearying of the struggle,

were to make a shameful peace,

Nothing would remain for the smaller states of Europe,

with their shipping and their possessions,

but to be divided between the opposite, though similar,

barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism.⁹⁵

Hoare commented in his diary: “Winston’s broadcast to the neutrals. Bad effect.” One consequence of the broadcast, unknown in London, was a Führerordnung to restudy possible operations in Scandinavia. Hitler guessed—correctly—that the first lord of the Admiralty had his eye on Norway. The Foreign Office was more concerned about the reaction in neutral capitals. In a pained note Halifax wrote Churchill: “I am afraid I think the effect of your broadcast in the countries which you no doubt had principally in mind has been very different from what you anticipated—though if I had seen your speech myself, I should have expected some such reactions.” Among the newspapers which had bridled were Het Handelsblad in Holland, Journal de Genève, Denmark’s Politiken, and Norway’s Morgenbladet. Halifax complained that it “puts me in an impossible position if a member of the Gov. like yourself takes a line in public which differs from that taken by the PM or myself: and I think, as I have to be in daily touch with these tiresome neutrals, I ought to be able to predict how their minds will work.” Churchill answered at once: “This is undoubtedly a disagreeable bouquet. I certainly thought I was expressing yr view & Neville’s…. Do not however be quite sure that my line will prove so inconvenient as now appears. What the neutrals say is vy different from what they feel: or from what is going to happen.” In fact Hitler had designs on most of them, and before spring ended the swastika would float over all their capitals but Switzerland’s.⁹⁶

Halifax had passed over the one paragraph in the broadcast with momentous implications. It was a reference to the fighting going on in Finland, part of a complex issue which no one in England, including Churchill, understood. The Russo-German marriage of convenience had scarcely been consummated in Poland before divorce proceedings were quietly begun. Stalin, anxious to guard his Baltic flank from a future Nazi attack, signed pacts with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, permitting Moscow to garrison Red Army troops in each. He then turned to Finland. Among his objectives, all of which were defensive, was blocking the Gulf of Finland with artillery on both coasts, thus protecting the entrance to Leningrad. The Soviet Union offered Helsinki 2,134 square miles in exchange for the cession of 1,066 Finnish square miles. National sentiment—and fear of a German reprisal—barred an agreement. The Russians, desperate, offered to buy the territory. Helsinki still refused, and on November 30, 1939, the Red Army invaded Finland. To outsiders the invasion was an atrocity as black as the Nazi seizure of Poland. In retrospect, however, the difference is obvious. Russia’s need to defend Leningrad is clear. The city came perilously close to conquest by the Germans later, and would certainly have fallen to the Nazis without the strip taken from the Finns.

The necessities of war modify principle; the hand of a country whose existence is threatened is not stayed by the rules of war. Churchill, at this very time, was telling the War Cabinet that “We must violate Norwegian territorial waters”; and Pétain, worried about the stretch of French frontier undefended by the Maginot Line, had told the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre that if France was to remain faithful to the principle which had saved her in the last war (“the defensive and continuous front”), she must face the fact that the one stretch of her frontier unprotected by the Maginot Line was the classic invasion route followed by Germans for nearly two thousand years. Consequently, he concluded: “Nous devons entrer en Belgique!”—“We must go into Belgium!” Winston agreed that Belgium could not possibly remain neutral, that it was essential to erect “a shield along the Belgian frontier to the sea against that terrible turning movement” which had “nearly encompassed our ruin in 1914.”⁹⁷

To the astonishment of the world, tiny Finland threw the Russians back. Beginning with the Japanese conquest of Manchuria eight years earlier, the aggressor powers had repeatedly overwhelmed weak, poorly led defenders. Now a small country with one-fortieth the strength of the Soviet Union was humiliating a great power, sending the invaders reeling from the Mannerheim Line, named for their leader, Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil von Mannerheim. The Finn victories seemed miraculous, but there were several explanations. One was Mannerheim himself. Before the Russian Revolution, when Finland belonged to the czar, he had served as a lieutenant general; he had fought the Bolsheviks to a standstill then, and now, aged seventy-two, had come out of retirement to do it again. Stalin was holding his crack divisions in reserve should Hitler strike. He had sent the Red Army’s poorest troops, ill-trained and sorely lacking in fighting spirit, against the Finns. Mannerheim led men fueled by the incentive of soldiers defending their homeland. He blinded the Russians with superior tactics, the use of superbly trained ski troops, a thorough knowledge of the lakes and forests constituting the terrain’s natural obstacles, and a strategy peculiarly suitable to arctic warfare—cutting the enemy’s line of retreat, waiting until the Russians were frozen and starved, and then counterattacking. The paralyzed invaders were not even properly clothed for the bitter Finnish winter. Churchill had spoken for tens of millions when, in his indictment of neutrals, he made an exception: “Only Finland—superb, nay, sublime—in the jaws of peril—Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle.”⁹⁸

The British and the French—seeing the opportunity for a pretext to cross northern Sweden, and, in passing, to seize the Swedish iron mines at Gällivare, vital to the Third Reich’s war effort—were about to send “volunteers” to aid the Finns when the tide turned. After two months of frustration the Russians secured their communications from the Leningrad-Murmansk frontier, which they should have done before the invasion, and launched a major assault on the Mannerheim Line with fourteen divisions of sledge-borne infantry supported by heavy artillery, tanks, and warplanes. The Finns stood up to it for five ferocious weeks, counterattacking the tanks with what Churchill called “a new type of hand-grenade”—bottles filled with gasoline and topped by wick, lit at the moment of hurling—which they audaciously christened Molotov cocktails. They gave ground slowly, but they gave it. Vyborg, vital to the defense, was threatened by frontal assault and, from the rear, by troops crossing the icebound Gulf of Finland and the icebound island of Hogland. On March 6, 1940, the Finns sued for peace and the Allies disbanded their expeditionary force. The repercussions of this—for England, and particularly for Churchill—were almost immediate. Winston felt he now had an excellent precedent for intervention in Scandinavia. The greatest sequel, however, was taking shape in the minds of Hitler and the German General Staff in Zossen. Like Britain’s first lord of the Admiralty, they underestimated Soviet military strength “with,” as Liddell Hart writes, “momentous consequences the following year.”⁹⁹

Churchill was not the first man in European public life to exploit the possibilities of radio. Hitler had been doing it for seven years. But Winston was the first British statesman to reach people in their homes and move them even more deeply than Roosevelt had in his fireside chats. Because the BBC had gone to great lengths to avoid controversy, its interwar programs were extraordinarily dull—“Arranging a Garden” and “Our Friends at the Zoo” were typical. So was Churchill’s scheduled talk on the Mediterranean, which had brought Guy Burgess to Chartwell in 1938. Public issues had been discussed over the BBC, and earlier in the decade Winston had managed to get a word in now and then, but as the crises mounted on the Continent and tensions increased, Reith screened participants in debates, approving only those who presented bland views, offending no listeners, particularly those occupying the front bench in the House of Commons.

Until he entered the War Cabinet, Churchill’s audiences had been largely confined to the House, lecture halls, and, during elections, party rallies. Suddenly that had changed. England was at war; the only action was at sea, and millions whose knowledge of Churchillian speeches had been confined to published versions heard his rich voice, resonant with urgency, dramatically heightened by his tempo, pauses, and crashing consonants, which, one listener wrote, actually made his radio vibrate. Churchill had been a name in the newspapers, but even his own columns lacked the power of his delivery. He found precisely the right words for convictions his audiences shared but had been unable to express. He spoke of “thoughtless dilettanti or purblind worldlings who sometimes ask us: ‘What is it that Britain and France are fighting for?’ To this I answer: ‘If we left off fighting you would soon find out.’ ” His elaborate metaphors, simplistic but effective, fortified his argument, and were often witty: “A baboon in a forest is a matter of legitimate speculation; a baboon in a Zoo is an object of public curiosity; but a baboon in your wife’s bed is a cause of the gravest concern.”¹⁰⁰

After the fall of Poland, when Hitler told the Western democracies to choose between a negotiated peace with him or “the views of Churchill and his following,” Chamberlain gave him the official reply (which Churchill helped draft), but England heard Winston’s, on the evening of November 12, 1939:

We tried again and again to prevent this war, and for the sake of peace we put up with a lot of things happening which ought not to have happened. But now we are at war, and we are going to make war, and persevere in making war, until the other side have had enough of it…. You may take it absolutely for certain that either all that Britain and France stand for in the modern world will go down, or that Hitler, the Nazi regime, and the recurring German or Prussian menace to Europe will be broken or destroyed. That is the way the matter lies and everybody had better make up his mind to that solid, somber fact.¹⁰¹

Like a thespian, Churchill began to receive critical notices. When he rose from the front bench to address the House of Commons, Beverley Baxter, an MP and a writer for the Beaverbrook press, compared him to “the old bandit who had been the terror of the mountain passes… the fire in him was burning low. His head was thrust forward characteristically, like a bull watching for the matador. He squared his shoulders a couple of times as if to make sure that his hands were free for the gestures that might come.” When Winston told BBC listeners that “Now we have begun; now we are going on; now with the help of God, and the conviction that we are the defenders of civilisation and freedom, we are going on, and we are going on to the end,” Virginia Cowles wrote that he was “giving the people of Britain the firm clear lead” they needed and “had not found elsewhere.”¹⁰²

In December, the war’s fourth month, a public opinion poll reported that barely half of the British people had expressed confidence in Chamberlain—one disillusioned Conservative described him as “hanging onto office like a dirty old piece of chewing gum on the leg of a chair”—and Churchill, right behind him, was gaining. In the House of Commons smoking room, and in the lobby, predictions that Winston would succeed Chamberlain, once shocking, were no longer whispered; they were legitimate speculation. The theme is an undercurrent in Nicolson’s diaries, returning whenever disaster looms. The first cluster of references begins early, as on September 17, when he writes, “At 11 am. (a bad hour) Vita comes to tell me that Russia has invaded Poland and is striking toward Vilna…. It may be that within a few days we shall have Germany, Russia and Japan against us.” At the end of the entry, clearly a frightened man, he writes: “Chamberlain must go. Churchill may be our Clemenceau or our Gambetta. To bed very miserable and alarmed.” Nine days later, in the House, Nicolson watches as “The Prime Minister gets up to make his statement. He is dressed in deep mourning…. One feels the confidence and spirits of the House dropping inch by inch. When he sits down there is scarcely any applause. During the whole speech Winston Churchill had sat hunched beside him looking like the Chinese god of plenty suffering from acute indigestion.” Then Churchill rises. Nicolson is euphoric: “The effect of Winston’s speech was infinitely greater than could be derived from any reading of the text…. One could feel the spirits of the House rising with every word…. In those twenty minutes Churchill brought himself nearer the post of Prime Minister than he has ever been before. In the Lobbies afterwards even Chamberlainites were saying, ‘We have now found our leader.’ ” And then, in early October—at a meeting of the Eden group—Nicolson hears the second Lord Astor tell members that he “feels it is essential that the Prime Minister should be removed and that Winston Churchill should take his place.”¹⁰³

In Winston’s place another ambitious politician hearing such praise—and it was coming to him from many sides—might have taken the pulse of the House, seeking to put together a coalition to topple the government and then form one of his own. Although members of this House of Commons, elected in 1935, were no longer reflective of the national mood, they too had built high hopes in the aftermath of Munich only to see them dashed; many felt betrayed; many others had heard from constituents who felt so. But plotting wasn’t Churchill’s style. He owed the Admiralty and his seat on the War Cabinet to the prime minister. Moreover, Chamberlain hadn’t bullied him, called him on the carpet, or interfered in any way with his administration of the country’s naval policy, though he may have been tempted; Winston, being Winston, had critics among naval officers of flag rank.¹⁰⁴

Chamberlain did visit the upper war room frequently, but was always cordial and left expressing gratitude—if he knew that Sinclair and Beaverbrook were also shown the Admiralty maps (though neither was a member of the government), he kept it to himself. In the House Winston loyally supported the government’s policies—was indeed their most forceful advocate—and praised the P.M. from time to time. In one of his broadcasts he said: “You know I have not always agreed with Mr. Chamberlain, though we have always been personal friends. But he is a man of very tough fiber, and I can tell you that he is going to fight as obstinately for victory as he did for peace.” The war had, in fact, brought out an unexpected streak of belligerence in the prime minister. “Winston, for his part,” Colville noted, “professes absolute loyalty to the P.M. (and indeed they get along admirably),” while Chamberlain wrote: “To me personally Winston is absolutely loyal, and I am continually hearing from others of the admiration he expressed for the P.M.”¹⁰⁵

It was the same in Churchill’s private life. Virginia Cowles, lunching at Admiralty House, was startled by Winston’s reaction when one of the children attempted a mild jest at Chamberlain’s expense. In the past, she remembered, jokes at the prime minister’s expense had been featured at almost every meal, but this time she saw “a scowl appear on the father’s face. With enormous solemnity he said: ‘If you are going to make offensive remarks about my chief you will have to leave the table. We are united in a great and common cause and I am not prepared to tolerate such language about the Prime Minister.’ ” Similarly, when he received Lady Bonham Carter, née Violet Asquith—“Well, here we are back in the old premises after a short interval of twenty-five years,” he said in greeting—her criticism of “the old appeasers” still in the government sparked a Churchillian rebuke. In a vehement defense of Chamberlain, he said: “No man is more inflexible, more single-minded. He has a will of steel.”¹⁰⁶

On Friday the thirteenth of October, Churchill recorded, “my relations with Mr. Chamberlain had so far ripened that he and Mrs. Chamberlain came to dine with us at Admiralty House, where we had a comfortable flat in the attics. We were a party of four.” During Stanley Baldwin’s first prime ministry the two men had been colleagues for five years, yet they had never met socially. Churchill, “by happy chance”—one doubts that luck had anything to do with it—mentioned the Bahamas, knowing Chamberlain had spent several years there. Winston was “delighted to find my guest expand… to a degree I had not noticed before.” Out came the long, sad story; Neville’s father was convinced that the family fortune could be enriched, and an Empire industry developed, if his younger son grew sisal on a barren island near Nassau. Neville spent six years trying. Buffeted by hurricanes, struggling with inadequate labor, “living nearly naked,” as Churchill paraphrased him, he built a small harbor, wharf, and a short railroad. But those were ancillary; his objective was to produce sisal, and although he tried every known fertilizer he found it could not be done, or at any rate not by him. “I gathered,” wrote Winston, in one of his wonderfully wry curtain lines, “that in the family the feeling was that although they loved him dearly they were sorry to have lost fifty thousand pounds.” And then a thought flashed across his mind: “What a pity Hitler did not know when he met this sober English politician with his umbrella… that he was actually talking to a hard-bitten pioneer from the outer marches of the British Empire!”¹⁰⁷

But that was not the height of the evening. During dinner an officer came up from the war room immediately below them to report that a Nazi submarine had been sunk. He reappeared during dessert with news that a second U-boat had been sunk, and yet again, just before the ladies left the prime minister and first lord to their brandy, to announce, rather breathlessly, that a third sub had been sunk. Mrs. Chamberlain asked Winston: “Did you arrange all this on purpose?” Her host “assured her,” as he put it, “that if she would come again we would produce a similar result.”¹⁰⁸

As ruler of the King’s navy, Winston was paid £5,000 a year and found; Admiralty House was an absolute defense against creditors. Clementine felt like a young woman again. She hadn’t christened a ship in over twenty-six years, but she remembered the drill when invited to launch the aircraft carrier Indomitable at Barrow-in-Furness. Winston was there, and a photograph—taken at the instant she was gaily waving the ship away—became his favorite picture of her; years later, when he returned to his easel, he sketched an enchanting portrait from it. Lord Fraser, watching him during the launching, observed first “his cheers” as the long vessel slid free of the ways, “and then the grave salute,” perhaps prompted by thoughts of the ordeals Indomitable “would have to face in the future.”¹⁰⁹

Once the first lord and his lady had settled in topside at Admiralty House, Clementine’s friends—and some acquaintances who weren’t—came calling, wide-eyed ladies who could scarcely wait to see how she had done over the attics. Unwilling to offend them, she took them on tour, though she felt martyred; she had good taste, knew it, and didn’t need confirmation. The only one qualified to judge was Diana Cooper, and she confined her criticisms to her diary. Even there she added that she was glad that the Churchills were in Admiralty House: “Winston’s spirit, strength and confidence are… a chime that wakes the heart of the discouraged. His wife, more beautiful now than in early life, is equally fearless and indefatigable. She makes us all knit jerseys, for which the minesweepers must bless her.”¹¹⁰

Winston hadn’t time to miss Chartwell, but something had to be done; it was impractical to keep the mansion open and prodigal to continue paying servants when only maintenance was necessary. In the early days of the war it seemed destined for a humanitarian purpose. In anticipation of heavy, continuous bombing of British cities, the evacuation of over 1,250,000 women and children, particularly those living near London’s East Side docks, had begun in August. Members of the upper class, their attitudes formed in abstract discussion of “the underprivileged” and “depressed areas,” flung open the doors of their great country homes and received the evacuees with a compassion and a hospitality that was frequently, and swiftly, regretted. Two cultures clashed; the young strangers had never seen or even heard of underwear; many would neither eat at tables nor sleep in beds; they were accustomed to doorways and alleys. Others brought lice which often spread to a horrified hostess and her own children. The unbridgeable gap was reflected in the remark of a Whitechapel mother to her six-year-old: “You dirty thing, messing the lady’s carpet. Go and do it in the corner.”¹¹¹

Chartwell had welcomed two East End mothers and their seven children. But like most other evacuees they drifted back to the docks, homesick and weary of the green country landscapes. Clemmie conferred with Winston. After two years’ work he had nearly finished Orchard Cottage, to which they intended to retire while Randolph—who had joined his father’s old regiment, the Fourth Hussars, and married the lovely Pamela Digby—moved into the big house. The cottage’s three bedrooms were quite livable; if the first lord yearned for a weekend, they could stay there. Cousin Moppet agreed to serve as caretaker. She moved into what had been the chauffeur’s cottage and was presently joined by Diana’s two small children and their nannie. They had been evacuated but did not miss London, where their mother was serving as an officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS). Duncan Sandys, Diana’s husband, had been called up by his territorial unit and was stationed in London with an antiaircraft battery. Sarah and Vic Oliver had taken a flat in Westminster Gardens. “Darling Papa,” Sarah wrote Winston,

… wherever I go, people rush up to me and shake me by the hand, congratulate me, and smile on me—because of you, and I felt I must pass on some of their wishes and good will to you.

There was such a lovely picture of you on the Newsreel the other day, and the buzz and excitement that swept through the theatre, suddenly made me feel so inordinately proud that I was your daughter, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had never really told you, through shyness and inarticulateness—how much I love you, and how much I will try to make this career that I have chosen—with some pain to the people I love, and not a little to myself—worthy of your name—one day—¹¹²

The note was signed, “Your loving Sarah.” She was his favorite, and he needed her now. Security was so tight that every servant had to be investigated and cleared; even conversations with most friends and relatives were tense. Discussions of nearly everything now on Winston’s mind was forbidden, so Clementine entertained less and less, grouping “outsiders,” as the Churchills called them, together at dinner parties. Mary, seventeen and just out of school, lived with her parents, worked in a canteen and Red Cross workroom, and was enjoying her first taste of London society. Not everyone, she recalls, was barred from discussions of restricted information: “There was the small golden circle of trusted colleagues known to be ‘padlock,’ and to whom, of course, that trust was sacred.” Nevertheless, the circle was very small. In wartime every cabinet member had to be careful in conversation, and this was especially true of the Admiralty’s first lord. As Winston had said of Jellicoe in the first war, he was the only minister who could lose the war in an afternoon. Even the list of outsiders was short, excluding many with whom they had been close in the past.¹¹³

It certainly did not include Unity Mitford, who arrived back in England with a self-inflicted bullet wound in her neck. She had not cared to live through a war between her homeland and her beloved führer. The government did what it could to protect the privacy of her return, posting a guard with a fixed bayonet at the dock gate—“Nazi methods,” fumed an Express reporter—but when her father protested that the whole family was being persecuted as Nazi sympathizers, Winston declined to intervene. Lord Redesdale and his talented daughters would have to muddle through on their own.¹¹⁴

The knitting bee into which Lady Diana had been drafted was only one of Clementine’s projects. Life aboard the small boats which had been commandeered by the Admiralty and transformed into minesweepers was spartan and uncomfortable; therefore Clemmie made a successful public appeal for contributions to the Minesweepers and Coastal Craft Fund. She also served as a volunteer at the Fulmer Chase Maternity Home for officers’ wives. By now she had become resigned, if not reconciled, to the company of Brendan Bracken and the Prof, and invited them to join other “padlock” friends, relatives, and “Chartwell regulars” in celebrating Christmas at Admiralty House. For Churchill it was a rare moment of relaxation; even so, he disappeared from time to time to check Pim’s maps, aware that on this most sacred of holidays there were Britons who could not observe it, whose duties kept them at peril on the sea.¹¹⁵

In the United States thirty years later, Americans protesting the Vietnam War displayed bumper stickers asking: “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” The answer is that the war would become inconvenient, depressing, vexing, and, most of all, a bore—which is what Britons called World War II’s first eight months: the Bore War. To Chamberlain it was the Twilight War, to Churchill the Sinister Trance, to Frenchmen the Drôle de Guerre, to Germans the Sitzkrieg, and to U.S. Senator William Borah and his fellow Americans the Phony War. But for the average Englishman it remained a bloody bore.¹¹⁶

In that strange lull following the fall of Poland a state of war existed between the Third Reich and the Anglo-French forces confronting them, but after Gamelin’s offensive de la Sarre the only Allied casualty on the Continent was a British corporal who suffered a flesh wound while cleaning his rifle. Britain had been psyched up in September, ready for sacrifice; two stock comments at the time were, “We can’t let old Hitler get away with it again, can we?” and “It’s got to come, so we might as well have it and have done with it.” An Englishwoman wrote that “we seemed to me to be going to war as a duty,” because “it was the only wise course to take…. I began to hope (feeling very glad nobody knew) that the air raid would begin at once and the worst happen quickly.” After Chamberlain’s broadcast declaring war on Germany, a young office girl in Sheffield stood with her parents as the national anthem was played; she had “a funny feeling inside…. I know we were all in the same mind, that we shall and must win.” A middle-aged schoolmistress noted: “At 11:15 I went up, and we sat round listening to Chamberlain speaking. I held my chin high and kept back the tears at the thought of all that slaughter ahead. When ‘God Save the King’ was played we stood.”¹¹⁷

The country had braced itself to withstand a shock, believing its cause just, and then—nothing happened. As one Englishman put it: “The sense of mission turned sour.” Chamberlain, demanding that the wage claims of workers be withdrawn, insisted that the wealthy had already made voluntary sacrifices. Audiences, even in Birmingham, laughed at him. Admiralty control of merchantmen often determined what was imported and what was not, and the first lord’s ruling that all ships must zigzag to evade U-boats—a carryover from the last war—doubled the length of voyages. As a result there were shortages of everything: food, coal, and—though the government had encouraged householders to keep backyard hens—grain to feed poultry. Sugar, bacon, ham, and butter were rationed: by the fifth month of the war forty-eight million ration books had been issued in the United Kingdom. Mutton, smoked to look like bacon, became known as “macon”; native and imported butter were lumped together and officially designated “nation butter.” In London Gracie Fields bellowed out a new hit:

They can muck about

With your Brussels sprout,

But they can’t ration love!

There was even a shortage of noise. Under the Control of Noises (Defence) Order, ambulance sirens, factory whistles, and automobile horns were prohibited. Later, church bells were added. The thought behind this was that such sounds might alarm citizens or confuse those responsible for defending the city. It does not seem to have occurred to the authorities that Britons who had been hearing these noises all their lives might find silence alarming. In the territorials ammunition for rifles and Bren guns was rationed, and frequently officers, whose only personal weapons were their pistols, were unable to fire a single practice round. MPs like Sandys who were also reserve officers were accosted, at officers’ mess, with complaints and questions. One question which they themselves would have liked to raise in the House irked property owners, which many of them were. In the first week of the war the government had requisitioned private property for wartime use. Tenants were evicted, warehouses emptied, livestock ousted from barns which were then locked. Winter deepened, spring approached, and the housing, warehouses, and barns stood empty. What had the government wanted them for? And where were the evacuees, now streaming back into London, going to live?¹¹⁸

Doubt, suspicion, and distrust of authority—the mood known as “bloody-mindedness” in the British army—appeared and spread. The lower classes were especially restive. As late as May 3, when all continued quiet on the western front, Jock Colville’s Downing Street diary noted “a somewhat alarming report from the Conservative Central Office…. It seems that the war is not popular among the lowest sections of the community, that there is a suspicion it is being fought in the interests of the rich, and that there is much discontent about the rising cost of living.” He added perceptively: “This is but a slight foretaste of what we shall have to face after the war.” But the discontent was everywhere. A public opinion poll found that 46 percent of the British people were gloomy, 20 percent saw “a dark future” which would eventually reveal “a silver lining,” 22 percent were fatalistic, and only 12 percent were optimistic. Churchill belonged with those believing in a silver lining. At the end of the war’s first week he wrote Ambassador Corbin that “if there is full comradeship I cannot doubt our victory”; and, in another letter, he reaffirmed his conviction that—quoting his Boer War captors, who had given him a lifelong maxim to live by—“all will come right if we all work together to the end.”¹¹⁹

But Winston, whose home and office were in the same building, did not have to cope with the blackout, the most exasperating irritant of a war in which the enemy had yet to appear. On Christmas Day, King George VI, following precedent, addressed his people over the BBC. He had inherited his father’s gift for tedium—“A new year is at hand,” he said. “We cannot tell what it will bring”—and his closing remark was more appropriate than he knew. “Go out into darkness,” he told them, “and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.” Englishmen knew bloody well they were going out into darkness, but they preferred the known way, believing it safer, and were convinced that after nightfall nothing was better than light.¹²⁰

In the beginning the impenetrable darkness had been rather exciting, like Guy Fawkes Day. But it could also be dangerous. In January a Gallup poll reported that since the outbreak of war about one Briton in five had been hurt in blackouts: bowled over by invisible runners, bruised by walking smack into an Air Raid Precautions post, stumbling over a curb, or being knocked down by a car without lights when they were on a street or road and didn’t know it. Criminals appeared in the Square Mile, the heart of London, and even sortied into the West End. Just before Christmas some shopping centers tested what was known as “amenity lighting”—equivalent to the glow of a single candle seen seventy feet away. It was judged more depressing than utter darkness. Youth had fun with it, as youth always does. In the tube they merrily sang bawdy music hall ballads popular when Churchill was a handsome young cavalry officer—“Knees Up, Mother Brown” was a hit once more. Mass Observation reported a new fashion; a young couple would enjoy “intercourse in a shop doorway on the fringe of passing crowds, screened by another couple waiting to perform the same adventure. It has been done in a spirit of daring, but is described as being perfectly easy and rather thrilling.”¹²¹

When war broke out, or was reported to have broken out, Air Raid Precautions wardens had been popular. Usually they were kindly, avuncular neighbors, looking a bit sheepish at first in their helmets as they went from door to door testing gas masks and explaining that no chink of light should escape a dwelling. But as time passed people grew tired of waiting for the Luftwaffe. One man told an interviewer that he felt like a patient in a dentist’s waiting room: “It’s got to come and will probably be horrible while it lasts, but it won’t last forever, and it’s just possible these teeth won’t have to come out after all.” It was just possible that Nazi Heinkels or Junkers would never appear in the night skies over England, so Mum or Dad might carelessly leave a shade up an inch or two, or a door ajar. Then the fatherly wardens turned into monsters. Their shining hour would come, and soon; in the Bore War, however, many of them were stigmatized to a degree which is puzzling today. But it should be remembered that in those days an Englishman’s home was considered his castle; a premium was placed on privacy. And many men in tin hats were seen as a threat to it.¹²²

In one remarkable instance a hundred-watt bulb had been left burning in an unoccupied house. The warden, a young, powerfully built man, found himself eyeball to eyeball with a double-locked mahogany door, framed in oak and set in concrete. He left, returned with a long iron bar, and, gathering his muscles for one heroic effort, burst into the room and turned off the lamp. The damage was fifteen pounds. An understanding magistrate reduced the usual two-pound fine to one pound. One outraged Londoner said he hated wardens more than Nazis and wanted to strangle them. If the German bombers had come it would have been different, but they hadn’t. “What was the point of it?” asked Laurence Thompson, speaking for countless thousands. The English people, he wrote, were “a decent, puzzled, discontented people who had braced themselves to withstand Armageddon, and found themselves facing the petty miseries of burst water pipes, a shortage of coal, verminous evacuees, and the dim spiritual erosion of the blackout.”¹²³

The burst pipes, amounting to an epidemic, derived from the coldest European winter in forty-five years, an act of God which did not strengthen confidence in the King’s endorsement of His benevolence. The coal shortage contributed to it, of course, but even without the inconveniences of wartime, Britain and the Continent would have suffered. Trains were buried under thirty-foot drifts; snowplows dug them out, but even so they were over twenty-eight hours late in reaching their destinations. Among civilians communications were often impossible. You couldn’t phone, you couldn’t send a wire; hundreds of miles of telephone and telegraph wires were down. In Derbyshire the drifts towered over cottage roofs. The Thames was solid ice for eight miles—from Teddington to Sunbury. And the Strait of Dover was frozen at Dungeness and Folkestone. Afterward, one editorial surmised: “It is probable that on January 29, when chaotic transport conditions prevailed over a large part of England, due to snow and ice, Berlin had little idea of the extent of our wintry weather.”¹²⁴

It did not occur to that insular editor that the Continent might be sharing Britain’s misery. Actually, the Continent was just as frigid. Even the Riviera was desolate, and Berlin, like London, was snowbound. The weather, which had not saved Poland, gave the Allies a reprieve. Seldom, if ever, have meteorological conditions so altered the course of a war, though the issue of who benefited most is debatable. Telford Taylor believes that because “the extremity of that bitter winter alone prevented Hitler from launching [an attack] against an ill-equipped and ill-prepared Anglo-French army… the weather saved the British army, which at that time had only half the strength it was to attain by spring.” Certainly they felt blessed at the time. But afterward, when the OKW hierarchy was interrogated at Nuremberg, it became clear that during that arctic hiatus the Führer, in a brilliant stroke, completely changed his western strategy and thereby gained his margin of victory. How the Allies would have fared in the autumn of 1939 is moot. The fact that the French collapsed in the spring of 1940 is not, and the fewer troops the BEF had when France fell, the better, for in the ultimate crisis all of them had to be rescued.¹²⁵

Hitler’s military genius in the war’s early years—his gift for reviewing the choices presented by die Herren Oberbefehlshaber (the commanders in chief) and unerringly selecting the right one—can hardly be exaggerated. Later, after his victories persuaded him that he was invincible, he provided the same generals with evidence to support their contention that his strategy was a succession of blunders. It wasn’t; he achieved his remarkable triumphs despite them, in part because he understood them, and, more important, their soldiers, better than they did. Most of the world outside the Reich assumed that the Wehrmacht would rest after overwhelming Poland while the Führer digested his new conquest. Ironside disagreed. On September 15—twelve days before the surrender of Warsaw—the CIGS told the War Cabinet that the French believed the Wehrmacht “would stage a big attack on the Western Front” within a month, and he himself thought a German offensive possible before the end of October. It seemed improbable. Even Churchill wrote Chamberlain later that same Friday that in his view a German attack on the western front “at this late season” was “most unlikely.” A turn eastward and southward through Hungary and Rumania made more sense to Winston. He doubted that the Führer would turn westward until “he has collected the easy spoils which await him in the East,” thereby giving his people “the spectacle of repeated successes.”¹²⁶

His vision was clouded there. However, no one outside the War Office and the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, and very few in them, matched his analysis of the Polish campaign. In that same letter he wrote that he was “strongly of the opinion that we should make every preparation to defend ourselves in the West.” In particular, French territory on the border “behind Belgium should be fortified night and day by every conceivable resource,” including “obstacles to tank attack, planting railway rails upright, digging deep ditches, erecting concrete dolls, land-mines in some parts and inundations all ready to let out in others, etc.,” which “should be combined in a deep system of defence.” The panzers which were overrunning Poland, he wrote, “can only be stopped by physical obstacles defended by resolute troops and a powerful artillery.” If defenders lacked those, he warned, “the attack of armoured vehicles cannot be resisted.”¹²⁷

Hitler shared Churchill’s admiration for tanks, and for that very reason he wanted to invade the neutral Low Countries before such obstacles could be built. He also assumed—illustrating his ignorance of how democracies work—that the Allies would soon occupy Belgium and Holland. Two days after Ironside’s presentation to the War Cabinet and Churchill’s advice to the prime minister, the Führer told the OKW commanders in Zossen that immediately after the Polish surrender he wanted to move the entire Wehrmacht across Germany and strike at the Allied forces. The Generalstab was shocked. They had been counting on several months of positional warfare in the west while they retrained their men and planned the army’s order of battle. He was adamant; a few weeks later, on October 10, he issued his Directive No. 6, ordering immediate preparations for an attack through Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland “at as early a date as possible” with the objective of defeating the French and establishing “a base for conducting a promising air and sea war against England.” To his staff he said he wanted the invasion under way by November 12.¹²⁸

Ten days after his directive, the generals submitted their plan for invasion in the west. In Hitler’s view, and in history’s, it was remarkable for its mediocrity and lack of imagination. They proposed a frontal assault driving head-on across the Low Countries to the Channel ports. Six days later the Führer suggested that the main thrust drive across southern Belgium and through the forested Ardennes toward Sedan. Their reply echoes Pétain’s view; the hills and thick woods of the Ardennes were “unmöglich” (“impossible”). The Führer made no further comment then. He hadn’t dismissed the idea, but had the fine weather held, the unimaginative attack would have proceeded. Although the Allied armies were not up to strength, that was the plan they expected, and they would have met it with everything they had. They did so seven months later, when they had much more. Unfortunately, the German plan of attack had changed; while they were rushing to bar the front door, the enemy slipped in the back.

The weather, responsible for the long delay, persuaded Hitler to postpone his assault nine times. Each time, he reconsidered lunging through the Ardennes with a panzer corps. His aides were instructed to bring him aerial photographs and detailed topographic maps of the terrain. Studying them, he felt confirmed; much of it was good panzer country, fields and roads; the forested areas which discouraged generals could be used to advantage, camouflaging tanks from aerial surveillance. In fact, although this was unknown to him, in 1939 when the Conseil Supérieur had staged a seven-division German drive in the French Ardennes with armored support, the “enemy” had put the defenders to flight. Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, army commander in chief, was unconvinced, and protocol required the Führer to deal directly with him. However, a handful of his most gifted generals, Manstein, Rundstedt, and Guderian among them, believed that a massive panzer Sichelschnitt (scythe-cut) in the south, with a far stronger force than Hitler had proposed, could slice through the Ardennes, drive to the sea, and trap the Allied armies in the north, where the Germans were expected. On February 17, in a traditional ceremony, five generals promoted to corps commanders were invited to dine with the Führer. Manstein was among them. He gave his host a detailed account of the plan he, Rundstedt, and Guderian had developed. Hitler was ecstatic. At noon the next day he issued a new Führerordnung, incorporating all Manstein’s points. By February 24, Hitler, Halder, and the OKW in Zossen, working round the clock, had completed the final orders for their Ardennes offensive. The blow would fall in May.

The British military presence in France, so slight before winter closed down Hitler’s plan for a lightning stroke in the west, grew through the bitter winter, until Lord Gort, the BEF commander, had nearly 400,000 men dug in. Unlike their fathers in 1914, they were not eager to fight, but they were ready. Morale was high; the British spit-and-polish traditions were observed; so were training schedules; and officers organized games, the more vigorous the better, to keep the men fit. Gracie Fields’s ration song was unheard here. The music halls had given the BEF a rollicking anthem which enjoyed tremendous popularity until events soured its lyrics.

We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line.

Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?

Soldiers given leave headed for Paris, where the season’s hit shows were Paris, Reste Paris, at the Casino de Paris, starring Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker; Lucienne Boyer at her boîte de nuit in the rue Volney; and revivals of Cyrano de Bergerac and Madame sans Gêne at the Comédie Française. But on the whole Tommies found the City of Light disappointing. The attitude of the French puzzled them. They seemed surly, hostile, smoldering with grievances. And so they were. Some of their anger was intramural; they held their leaders in contempt. After the Russians had picked up their winnings in Poland and declared themselves at peace, France’s powerful Communist party took the position that the war was a “capitalist-imperialist project” in which workers had no stake. At the other end of the political spectrum, the extreme French right still yearned for an understanding with the Reich; with Poland gone, they argued, the need for an anti-Bolshevik bulwark was all the greater. To them, German National Socialism was preferable to French socialism; their rallying cry was “Better Hitler than Blum.” Lucien Rebattet, a gifted writer for the Fascist weekly Je Suis Partout, wrote that the war had been launched “by the most hideous buffoons of the most hideous Jewish and demagogic regime…. We are supposed once more to save the Republic, and a Republic worse than the one in 1914…. No, I do not feel the least anger against Hitler, but much against all the French politicians who have led to his triumph.”¹²⁹

However, the chief target of French discontent was Britain. Although the British were allies, they were treated with scorn. Until Tommies began manning sectors of the Maginot Line, a brigade at a time, most poilus were unaware that the British Expeditionary Force even existed. Certainly their newspapers didn’t tell them. The Parisian press, reinforcing the public mood, was resentful not of Nazi aggression, the root cause of the war, but of l’Albion perfide. England, in the popular French view, had forced France into unnecessary hostilities, and there was widespread suspicion that the British had no intention of fighting—that when battle appeared imminent they would withdraw to their island, shielded by the Royal Navy, while poilus were slaughtered. Daladier told William Bullitt, the American ambassador, that he was convinced Britain intended to let the French do all the fighting. At the Quai d’Orsay, Alexis Léger spoke as though Britain were uncommitted, telling Bullitt: “La partie est perdue. La France est seule.” Holding his first staff meeting as supreme commander of Allied troops, Gamelin revealed his opinion of his ally by neglecting to bring an interpreter and speaking so rapidly that less than half of what he said was understood by the British officers.¹³⁰

We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line

’Cause the washing day is here.

Churchill had been visiting France since childhood, and despite his atrocious accent, he spoke the language fluently. Hitler spoke only German. He had never been abroad. Yet Churchill’s Francophilia was a romantic illusion, while the German führer’s evaluation of the people who had been Germany’s foe for over two thousand years was penetrating. “Hitler,” Churchill later wrote, “was sure that the French political system was rotten to the core, and that it had infected the French Army.” Whatever the reason, the rot was there. And Joseph Goebbels knew how to make it fester. The Luftwaffe, like the RAF, staged truth raids. They were, however, far more clever than England’s. Their contribution to what one French officer called “une guerre de confettis” was not leaflets but single slips of paper that fluttered down round the French lines. Resembling colored leaves, they bore on one side the message: “In the autumn the leaves fall. So fall the poilus, fighting for the English.” The obverse read: “In the spring the leaves come again. Not so the poilus.”¹³¹

The leaflets were followed by beguiling enticements from French-speaking Germans using bullhorns and large signs taunting poilus at the front, asking why they should die for Danzig, the Poles, or the British (“Ne mourez pas pour Danzig, pour les Polonais, pour les Britanniques!”). Nazi propagandistic statements quoted by Molotov, effective among French Communists, assigned to “la France et la Grande-Bretagne la responsabilité de la poursuite des hostilités.” On September 26, with Poland vanquished, the Germans opened a new propaganda campaign: “Why do France and Britain want to fight now? Nothing to fight about. Germany wants nothing in the West [L’Allemagne ne demande rien à l’ouest].” The most effective line was the assurance that if the French didn’t open fire, German guns would remain silent. Time reported a version of this: “We have orders not to fire on you if you don’t fire on us.” Soon poilus and Soldaten were bathing in the Rhine together. Time readers unfamiliar with the fighting spirit essential in infantry combat—not only for victory but also for the survival of the individual infantryman—might have thought this harmless. But it served the Führer in two ways. In the first week of the war civility between men on both sides would permit his thin screen of troops on the Reich’s western front to hold while the Wehrmacht finished off the Poles. And idle soldiers, especially those doubtful of their cause, deteriorate under such circumstances; their combat efficiency loses whatever edge it had, and when the balloon goes up, they find it almost impossible to kill the likable, fair-haired youths on the far shore, which means the youths on the far shore, no longer under orders to appear likable, are far likelier to kill them.¹³²

British soldiers appeared to be immune to the contagion. Their commanders were not defeatist, neither their great-grandfathers nor their fathers had been routed by German troops in 1870 and 1914—and besides, whoever heard of Blighty losing a war?

What though the weather be wet or fine,

We’ll just travel on without a care.

British officers, however, were worried. One of their strengths, and a source of impotent rage among those who lived under other flags and had to deal with them, was that Englishmen with their background could not be offended by pomposity because their own capacity for arrogance was infinite. In 1914 British officers had told their men, “The wogs”—a pejorative for subjects of the Empire—“begin at Calais.” They were still saying it in 1939, distinctly pronouncing the final s in Calais while natives gnashed their teeth. Gamelin, reading French aloud at top speed, could never win playing this game with them. They had invented insolence and would leave his hauteur a thing of shreds and patches.

They were, however, concerned about the poilus’ morale. If the Germans came—and despite enemy propaganda no one in authority doubted that they would—these French soldiers would be on the British right. Should they break, the BEF’s flank would be left hanging on air, the ultimate horror of a generation of soldiers wedded to the doctrine of le front continu. Again and again they had been told that the French army was “matchless,” a word, it now occurred to them, subject to two interpretations. Certainly few of them could recall seeing its equal in carelessness, untidiness, and lack of military courtesy. General Sir Alan Brooke, a future CIGS now commanding a BEF corps, attended a ceremony as the guest of General André-Georges Corap, commander of the French Ninth Army. In his memoirs he would recall taking the salute: “Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly and badly turned out. Men unshaven, horses ungroomed, clothes and saddlery that did not fit, vehicles dirty, and a complete lack of pride in themselves and their units. What shook me most… was the look in the men’s faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks, and although ordered to give ‘Eyes left,’ hardly a man bothered to do so.” It would be a distortion, however, to indict the conscripted French soldier for his reluctance to defend the soil of France. The blight went all the way to the top. It was their généralissime who expressly forbade poilus from firing on German working parties across the river. “Les Allemands,” he said, “répondront en tirant sur les nôtres” (“The Germans would only respond by firing on us”).¹³³

Sumner Welles, the American under secretary of state, accepted an invitation to inspect the Allied front. Welles was touring Europe as a special emissary of FDR, and in Washington he reported that French officers had privately complained to him that their men were undisciplined; unless the Germans attacked soon, they predicted, the poilus would spontaneously disband and go home. If an army’s leaders take a foreigner aside to criticize their own men, something is very wrong. Vigilant French leaders knew it. Not only was there no training; neither Gamelin nor General Georges, Churchill’s friend, ordered exercises at divisional strength to make commanders familiar with the problems of handling large units in the field. General André-Charles-Victor Laffargue later wrote: “Our units vegetated in an existence without purpose, settling down to guard duty and killing time until the next leave or relief.” Longer leaves were granted more frequently, recreation centers established, theatrical troupes summoned from Paris to entertain the troops.¹³⁴

Nothing worked. Morale continued to decline. General Edmond Ruby, commander of the First Army, was alarmed to find “a general apathy and ignorance among the ranks. No one dared give an order for fear of being criticized. Military exercises were considered a joke, and work unnecessary drudgery.” The next step down was alcoholism. It appears to have descended upon the whole army overnight. “L’ivrognerie”—drunkenness—“had made an immediate appearance,” General Ruby noted, “and in the larger railroad stations special rooms had to be set up to cope with it—euphemistically known as ‘halls of de-alcoholizing.’ ” So many men were so drunk in public that commanders began to worry about civilian morale.¹³⁵

Although Churchill believed that the French army would never break, however strong the German assault, in January 1940 he crossed the Channel for a visit to the front. He did not return reassured. The French artillery, he was pleased to find, had been improved “so as to get extra range and even to out-range, the new German artillery.” But he was deeply troubled by “the mood of the people,” which “in a great national conscript force is closely reflected in its army, the more so when that army is quartered in the homeland and contacts are close.” During the 1930s, he later wrote, “important elements, in reaction to growing Communism, had swung towards Fascism,” and the long months of waiting which had followed the collapse of Poland had given “time and opportunity” for “the poisons” of communism and fascism “to be established.” There could be “no doubt,” he observed, that “the quality of the French army” was being “allowed to deteriorate during the winter.” Sound morale in any army is achieved in many ways, “but one of the greatest is that men be fully employed at useful and interesting work. Idleness is a dangerous breeding-ground.” He had observed “many tasks that needed doing: training demanded continuous attention; defences were far from satisfactory or complete, even the Maginot Line lacked many supplementary field works; physical fitness demands exercise.” He had been struck by the “poor quality of the work in hand, by the lack of visible activity of any kind,” and thought the “emptiness of the roads behind the line was in great contrast to the continual coming and going which extended for miles behind the British sector.”¹³⁶

Colonel de Gaulle also believed the troops needed training and exercise, and urged it in a vigorous report to his superiors. He thought programs should be both intensive and exhausting, partly because the men weren’t fit but also to raise their spirits. Somewhere on its way up to high command his recommendation was lost, which was no surprise to those familiar with the system. In combat a leader’s greatest need is information, and if he is competent he does everything possible to establish a communications system that will survive in the chaos of battle, and, if possible, at least one backup net, for what works well in peacetime maneuvers may disintegrate and vanish when great armies clash in the fog of war.

Gamelin seems not to have anticipated this obstacle. Indeed, it was almost as though he set out to frustrate his own chain of command and assure his isolation when he was most needed. Poring over documents in Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris, he never established means of keeping in touch with field commanders. There was no radio at Vincennes. He could telephone Georges, the commander of all forces at the front, whose headquarters were at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, thirty-five miles away, but he preferred to drive, an hour each way on roads swarming with suburban Paris traffic. In the age of radio and the teletype, it took six hours for an order from Gamelin to reach an air force command—by which time the target would be gone—and forty-eight hours to issue a general order to all commands. One French officer described his remote headquarters as a “submarine without a periscope,” and later de Gaulle wrote bitterly: “There he was, in a setting as quiet as a convent [silencieux comme un couvent], attended by a few officers, working and meditating without mixing in day-to-day duties. In his retreat at Vincennes, General Gamelin gave the impression of a savant testing the chemical reactions of his strategy in a laboratory.”¹³⁷

Sir John Slessor of the Air Ministry, one of a series of visitors from London, described the supreme commander as a “nice old man not remotely equal to his enormous job.” Why, then, didn’t the British move to thwart the debacle that lay dead ahead? One reason was that the British troop commitment was much smaller than the French. Another was that in the last war it had taken four years to establish a unified command under Foch. Furthermore, Gamelin had served ably on Foch’s staff. Most members of His Majesty’s Government were Francophiles; they refused to credit the tales of Anglophobia across the water. All, Churchill included, retained their blind faith in the French army, which had taken the worst the Germans could throw at them between 1914 and 1918 and always came back. The poilus of this war were the sons of those in the last. Surely they had inherited the same fighting qualities. But they hadn’t. Unlike their fathers, they preferred to live.

There was also the Maginot Line. Those whose memories do not reach back to the 1930s cannot grasp its enormous reputation before its hour struck. La Ligne was considered one of the world’s wonders, and the French never lost an opportunity to polish its image. The French high command celebrated the first Christmas of the war by announcing that they had completed a staggering “work of fortification.” Their goal had been “to double the Maginot Line” and it was “virtually complete…. From the first of this month our new line of fortifications seems to have removed any hope the enemy may have entertained either of crossing or flanking the Maginot Line.”¹³⁸

We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line.

Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?

An American foreign correspondent asked about the Ardennes. Every staff officer was aware that the forest was unfortified; Hitler knew; Manstein, Guderian, Halder, and Rundstedt knew; and Liddell Hart had known of it for over eleven years. But the American public, the British public, and the French public did not know. A majority were under the impression that the Maginot shielded France from every possible German thrust. At Vincennes an officer in a kepi and flawless uniform of sky blue quoted Pétain—“Elle est impénétrable”—with the proviso that “special dispositions” must be made there. The edges on the enemy side would be protected; some block-houses would be installed. The war was nearly four months old, the Maginot Line had been doubled, but the dispositions were not complete. The American asked why. Because at this point the front would not have any depth, he was told, the enemy would not commit himself there. Finally: “Ce secteur n’est pas dangereux.”¹³⁹

We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line

Walter Lippmann was received as though he were a head of state; a dozen colonels took him on a tour of the Maginot Line, then accompanied him to Vincennes. Lippmann commented that there was only one thing wrong with the line: it was in the wrong place. The généralissime did not understand. What would happen, the American publicist asked, if the enemy attacked in the north, where the line ended at the Belgian frontier? Gamelin was glad he had asked. He was hoping the Germans would try that. “We’ve got to have an open side because we need a champs de bataille,” he explained. “The Maginot Line will narrow the gap through which they can come, and thus enable us to destroy them more easily.”¹⁴⁰

’Cause the washing day is here.

Colonel de Gaulle was a peste. He had been repeatedly referred to the army manual Les instructions pour l’emploi des chars—tanks—which clearly stated that “Combat tanks are machines to accompany the infantry…. In battle, tank units constitute an integral part of the infantry…. Tanks are only supplementary means…. The progress of the infantry and its seizing of objectives are alone decisive.” The role of the tank was to accompany infantry “et non pour combattre en formations indépendantes.” Could anything be clearer? He was worse than the aviators, who at least had the decency to remain silent after General Gamelin had told them: “There is no such thing as the aerial battle. There is only the battle on the ground.” Yet here was de Gaulle, turning up in Montry at general headquarters, where most of the General Staff and staff officers could be found, with another of his reports, this one on les leçons to be learned from the blitzkrieg in Poland. He wrote: “The gasoline engine discredits all our military doctrines, just as it will demolish our fortifications. We have excellent material. We must learn to use it as the Germans have.”¹⁴¹

At present, de Gaulle pointed out, French tanks were dispersed for infantry support. It would be wiser, he submitted, to follow the example of the Germans, forming them in armored divisions as the Wehrmacht had done in its Polish campaign, and, indeed, before the Anschluss. His proposals were rejected by two generals—one of whom predicted that even if Nazi tanks penetrated French lines they would face “la destruction presque complète.” To this snub the high command added mortal injury to the France de Gaulle loved. Despite the vindication of Guderian’s prewar book Achtung, Panzer! in Poland, the French high command decided to sell its tanks abroad. The R-35 was a better tank than any German model. Of the last 500 produced before May 10, 1940, nearly half—235—were sold to Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, with the result that when the Germans struck only 90 were on the French front. Moreover, while Nazi troops, Stukas, and armored divisions were massing in the Rhineland for their great lunge westward, the generals charged with the defense of French soil gathered representatives of countries not regarded as unfriendly to France and auctioned off 500 artillery pieces, complete with ammunition, and 830 antitank guns—at a time when the French army was desperately short of both weapons.¹⁴²

The French Ministry of War announced that 100,000 pigeons had been mobilized and housed inside the Maginot Line to carry messages through artillery barrages.

We’re gonna hang our washing on the Siegfried Line—

If the Siegfried Line’s still there!

The brief struggle in Finland had drawn the world’s attention to Scandinavia, a development deplored by the Scandinavians, who, like other neutrals, hoped they would be overlooked until the war was over. Norway’s yearning for obscurity—which was inevitably shared by Denmark, as it was situated between the Norwegians and the Reich—was frustrated by the Royal Navy on Friday, February 16, in an action which thrilled all England, widened the war, increased Churchill’s popularity, and, in its sequel, almost led to his ruin.

Probably Oslo’s desperate attempts to remain a spectator were doomed. A country’s neutrality cannot always be determined by its own government. If it is violated by one warring power, the country is like the ravished maiden in the Nibelungenlied legend who immediately becomes available to all others, and the Germans had been exploiting Norway’s territorial waters since the outbreak of the war. Swedish iron ore from Gällivare was “vital for the German munitions industry,” as Churchill had told the War Cabinet on September 19, and while in summer German ships could transport this ore across the Gulf of Bothnia, between Finland and Sweden, in winter it had to be moved westward to Narvik, a Norwegian port, and then down the length of the Norwegian coast through the Leads, a deep-water channel running parallel to the shore. Germany wasn’t the only country with U-boats; British submarines could have littered the floor of the North Atlantic with the sunken hulks of enemy freighters.¹⁴³

It hadn’t done so because their captains had remained within Norway’s three-mile limit, and the government in Oslo, fearful of Nazi reprisals, had decided not to protest. If this use of Norwegian territorial waters could not be stopped “by pressure on the Norwegian government,” said Churchill, it would be his duty to propose “the laying of mines” inside Norway’s “territorial waters.” There was precedent for this. The Admiralty had done it in 1917, and had successfully drawn the German ships out beyond the Leads. After the meeting broke up, he sent Pound a minute advising him that the War Cabinet, including Halifax, “appeared strongly to favor this action.” Therefore, he wrote, he wanted Admiralty staff to study the minelaying operation, adding: “Pray let me be continually informed of the progress of this plan, which is of the highest importance in crippling the enemy’s war industry.” A further decision of the War Cabinet would be made “when all is in readiness.”¹⁴⁴

Pound had seen to it that all was soon in readiness, but other members of the cabinet had not really shared Churchill’s sense of urgency, and when the project was mooted in Whitehall, the Foreign Office and the Dominions emitted sounds of alarm. After discussion a majority of the War Cabinet had decided that immediate action was unnecessary, and the matter had been set aside. This seemed to be the fate of every imaginative proposal Winston laid before them, and his sense of frustration is evident in a letter to a colleague. His “disquiet,” he wrote, was mainly due to “the awful difficulty which our machinery of war conduct presents to positive action. I see such immense walls of prevention, all building and building, that I wonder whether any plan will have a chance of climbing over them.”¹⁴⁵

The issue had remained on Churchill’s mind, however, and had been one of his motives in drafting Operation Catherine. Now in February a flagrant Nazi trespass inside the three-mile limit called for an instant response by the Admiralty. Before Graf Spee’s last battle, the captured crews of the British merchantmen she had sunk had been transferred to her supply ship, the Altmark. Over three hundred of these English seamen had been locked in Altmark’s hold, and they were still there, because after Graf Spee went down the smaller Altmark had escaped from the battered British warships. For nine weeks she had been hiding in the vastness of the South Atlantic; now, running out of fuel and provisions, with no safe haven elsewhere, she was bringing the British crews home to the Reich for imprisonment. On the morning of February 16 Winston was told that an RAF pilot had sighted her, hugging the Norwegian coast and heading south. Immediately he decided to rescue the men in her hold. Ordering all British warships in the area to “sweep northwards during the day,” he directed them “to arrest Altmark in territorial waters should she be found. This ship is violating neutrality in carrying British prisoners of war to Germany. Surely another cruiser or two should be sent to rummage the Skagerrak tonight? The Altmark must be regarded as an invaluable trophy.”¹⁴⁶

That afternoon H.M.S. Cossack, Captain Philip Vian commanding, sighted the German vessel. She fled into Jösing Fjord. Vian blocked the mouth of the fjord and sent in a destroyer with a boarding party. Two Norwegian gunboats intercepted them, and the captain of one of them, the Kjell, arrived by barge on the Cossack. Vian wrote afterward that he told the Norwegian that he “demanded the right to visit and search, asking him to come with me.” The Norwegian officer replied that the Altmark had been searched three times since her entry into Norwegian waters and that “no prisoners had been found. His instructions were to resist entry by force: as I might see, his ships had their torpedo tubes trained on Cossack. Deadlock.”¹⁴⁷

Vian signaled the Admiralty for instructions. Churchill had left word that any message concerning Altmark should be sent directly to him. The incident offers an excellent illustration of what General Sir Ian Jacob has called “the fury of his concentration.” On such occasions, Jacob writes: “When his mind was occupied with a particular problem, however detailed, it focused upon it relentlessly. Nobody could turn him aside.” Marder adds: “With a display of energy and his imagination, Churchill sometimes carried his offensive ideas too far…. The Baltic, and increasingly the Norwegian facet, became almost an obsession with him.” There were those in the Foreign Office who thought his reply to Vian was too aggressive; they were the same people who, after his broadcast criticizing neutral countries, had issued a gratuitous statement declaring that the first lord had not represented HMG policy.¹⁴⁸

In fact his instructions to Vian were almost flawless—“almost,” because he should have sent them through Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, Vian’s superior. He did phone Halifax and told him what he proposed to do. The foreign secretary hurried over to the Admiralty, where Winston and Pound lectured him on the “Law of Hot Pursuit” at sea. Halifax suggested giving the Norwegian captain an option—taking Altmark to Bergen under joint escort, for an inquiry according to international law. His suggestion was adopted, and then the order was radioed to Cossack. If the Norwegians refused to convoy Altmark to Bergen, Vian was told, he was to “board Altmark, liberate the prisoners, and take possession of the ship.” If a Norwegian vessel interfered she should be warned off, but “if she fires upon you, you should not reply unless the attack is serious, in which case you should defend yourself using no more force than is necessary, and ceasing fire when she desists.”¹⁴⁹

That night, as the first lord and the first sea lord sat up in the war room—“in some anxiety,” as Churchill wrote—Vian boarded Kjell and proposed the Halifax option. The Norwegian captain declined; he repeated that the German ship had been searched, that she was unarmed, and that she carried no British prisoners. These were all lies, but as Churchill pointed out, “Every allowance must be made” for the Norwegians, who were “quivering under the German terror and exploiting our forbearance.” Already the Nazis “had sunk 218,000 tons of Scandinavian ships with a loss of 555 Scandinavian lives.” Vian said he was going to board Altmark. He invited the Norwegian officer to join him. The invitation was declined; henceforth he and his sister ship were passive spectators.¹⁵⁰

So the Cossack entered the fjord alone, searchlights blazing, knifing through the ice floes until Vian realized that Altmark was under way and attempting to ram him. Luckily the German at the helm was a poor seaman. He ran his vessel aground. Vian forced his way alongside; his crew grappled the two ships together, and the British boarding party sprang across. The Nazi vessel was armed, with two pom-poms and four machine guns. The tars seized those and turned on Altmark’s crew; in a hand-to-hand fight four Germans were killed and five wounded; the others fled ashore or surrendered. No Norwegians had searched the ship. In battened-down storerooms and in empty oil tanks, 299 Britons awaited rescue. The boarding party was flinging open hatches; one of them called, “Are there any English down there?” There was a shouted chorus of “Yes!” and a boarder shouted back, “Well, the navy’s here!” By midnight Vian was clear of the fjord, racing home to England.¹⁵¹

The news reached Admiralty House at 3:00 A.M., and Churchill and Pound were jubilant. Randolph’s wife, Pamela, saw Cossack land the rescued prisoners at Leith, on the Firth of Forth, where doctors, ambulances, press, and photographers awaited them. She wrote her father-in-law: “You must have had a very thrilling & anxious night on Friday. It’s comforting to know we can be ferocious.” In his Downing Street diary, Jock Colville’s Saturday entry began: “There was great excitement at No. 10 over the Altmark affair, news of which reached us early in the morning. It is a perfect conclusion to the victory over the Graf von Spee.” The King sent a congratulatory note to his Admiralty’s first lord, who replied at once: “It is a vy gt encouragement & gratification to me to receive Your Majesty’s most gracious & kindly message…. By none is Your Majesty’s compliment more treasured than by the vy old servant of Your Royal House and of your father & yr grandfather who now subscribes himself / Your Majesty’s faithful & devoted subject / Winston S. Churchill.”¹⁵²

Arthur Marder speaks for RN professionals when he writes of the Altmark incident: “It was a minor operation of no significance save for its considerable moral effects.” The episode had repercussions, as we shall see, but the casual reference to its impact on the British public reflects the attitude of military professionals. In wartime they are condescending toward civilians, although public opinion, as France was already demonstrating, can determine what kind of war will be fought, and, to a considerable extent, whether it will be won or lost. Blackouts without bombers were merely exasperating; it was after the Altmark that people began to hate. Not all the people—the well-bred still recoiled from the chauvinism without which great victories are impossible. As late as April 26, 1940, Jock Colville saw “a group of bespectacled intellectuals” in Leicester Square’s Bierkeller “remain firmly seated while God Save the King was played. Everybody looked but nobody did anything, which shows that the war has not yet made us lose our sense of proportion or become noisily jingoistic.” The lower classes were less tolerant, and the newspapers fed their wrath. Churchill had found the rescued men “in good health” and “hearty condition,” but Fleet Street rechristened Altmark “The Hell-Ship”; those rescued were encouraged to exaggerate their ordeal, and their stories gained in the retelling. Public opinion was developing genuine hostility toward Nazi Germany. People wanted to believe in atrocities. Even after four of the men saved had appeared on a platform in the East End, looking well-fed and ruddy, a woman in the audience was quoted as saying: “If I saw a German drownding, I wouldn’t save him. Not after that, I couldn’t.”¹⁵³

Churchill, no hater, used the brief clash in the fjord to build patriotism and confidence in men like Vian and his crew. The House of Commons liked that. On Tuesday, February 20, Harold Nicolson noted: “Winston, when he comes in, is loudly cheered.” Admiral Keyes had been in the war room that night, Nicolson’s diary entry continued, and had told him how “Winston rang up Halifax and said, ‘I propose to violate Norwegian neutrality.’ The message was sent and they waited anxiously in the Admiralty for the result. What a result! A fine show. Winston, when he walks out of the House, catches my eye. He gives one portentous wink.”¹⁵⁴

Churchill wanted to squeeze every last drop out of it. The war hadn’t been much of a war thus far. The Germans, he knew, were refitting for an offensive somewhere, and the Allies—who should have been giving them no rest—remained passive. He had no authority over the other services, but he could make the navy fight. The battle off Montevideo had given England its first real news to cheer about, and on February 15, just one day before the Altmark triumph, he had greeted Exeter as she arrived at Plymouth. Now, on February 23, he gathered the heroes of the River Plate in the great hall of the Guildhall, the focal point for the government of London for over a thousand years. There, beneath the Gothic facade, beneath the four fantastic pinnacles, the exuberant coat-of-arms, and the monuments to Chatham, Nelson, and Wellington, he reminded those present—and the nation beyond—that the brunt of the war thus far had been borne by sailors, nearly three thousand of whom had already been lost in the “hard, unrelenting struggle which goes on night and day.” He said:

The spirit of all our forces serving on salt water has never been more strong and high than now. The warrior heroes of the past may look down, as Nelson’s monument looks down upon us now, without any feeling that the island race has lost its daring or that the examples they set in bygone centuries have faded as the generations have succeeded one another. It was not for nothing that Admiral Harwood, as he instantly at full speed attacked an enemy which might have sunk any one of his ships by a single salvo from its far heavier guns, flew Nelson’s immortal signal.¹⁵⁵

He was gathering himself for the final flourish, shoulders hunched, brow lowered, swaying slightly, holding them all in his stern gaze. It wasn’t a Bore War when Churchill spoke of it; it wasn’t squalid or demeaning; it wasn’t, in fact, like modern war at all. Destroying the Nazis and their führer became a noble mission, and by investing it with the aura of heroes like Nelson, men Englishmen had honored since childhood, he made the Union Jack ripple and St. George’s sword gleam. To the action off the Plate, he said, there had recently been added an epilogue, the feat of “the Cossack and her flotilla,” a gallant rescue, “under the nose of the enemy and amid the tangles of one-sided neutrality, of the British captives taken from the sunken German raider…. And to Nelson’s signal of 135 years ago, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty,’ there may now be added last week’s no less proud reply: ‘The Navy is here!’ ”¹⁵⁶

The Guildhall exploded in a roaring, standing ovation.

In his diary Hoare grumbled about “Winston overbidding the market in his speeches,” but it was a popular speech. No one had fewer illusions about combat than Siegfried Sassoon, who had been court-martialed for publishing his powerful antiwar poems while serving as a junior officer in the first war. Now he wrote Eddie Marsh: “What an apotheosis Winston is enjoying! I suppose he is the most popular—as well as being the ablest—political figure in England. He must be glorying in the deeds of the Navy, who are indeed superb. And W himself has certainly put up a grand performance.”¹⁵⁷

His last four words—“The Navy is here!”—wrote Laurence Thompson, “gripped the public mind. It was felt that, dull and unenterprising though the conduct of the war might be on land and sea, the navy was eternally there; and so it heroically was, bearing with the Merchant Navy the heaviest burden of the war.” England had gone to war no more eagerly than the French, and as a people the British were less vulnerable to slogans and political melodrama. But as divisions deepened in Paris and the rest of France, Britons grew more united. If they had to fight they would. And though it seemed on that Friday that the Royal Navy had preempted the national consciousness, British soldiers were about to take the field against Nazi troops for the first time. It was to be an inauspicious opening.¹⁵⁸

For Hitler the Royal Navy’s coup de main in Jösing Fjord was “unerträglich”—“intolerable.” He was enraged that the German seamen on the Altmark had not fought harder. According to Jodl’s diary he raved, “Kein Widerstand, Keine engl. Verluste!” (“No resistance, no British losses!”). This seems hard on the four Germans who had been killed in the firefight, but the Führer had his own yardstick of valor; he reserved his approval for men who had been worthy of him. Two days later, on February 19, Jodl’s diary reveals, “The Führer pressed energetically” for the completion of Weserübung—the code name for plans to occupy Norway—issuing orders to “equip ships; put units in readiness.” To lead this operation he summoned a corps commander from the western front, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, who had fought in Finland at the end of the last war. Later, under interrogation in Nuremberg, Falkenhorst said he had the impression that it was the Altmark incident which led Hitler to “carry out the plan now.”¹⁵⁹

The origins of Weserübung were more ambiguous than might appear to be the case. In his war memoirs Churchill wrote that “Hitler’s decision to invade Norway had… been taken on December 14, and the staff work was proceeding under Keitel.” The only relevant event on December 14 had been a meeting between Hitler and Major Vidkun Quisling, a former Norwegian minister of defense, who had fallen under the Nazi spell and whose present ambition was to betray his country to the Reich. Admiral Raeder had urged the Führer to exploit this man’s twisted allegiance, and Hitler had scheduled the interview because he wanted “to form an impression of him.” Afterward, the Führer had put him on the payroll “to combat British propaganda” and strengthen Norway’s Nazi party, an organization which existed almost entirely in Quisling’s imagination. But Weserübung had not been Hitler’s idea. In fact it was the only unprovoked Nazi aggression which wasn’t. It was drawn up by the Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine on orders from Raeder alone, which also made it unique; the Wehrmacht high command and its Generalstab were not consulted, and Göring wasn’t even told until the execution of the plan was hours away.¹⁶⁰

Hitler was aware of it, of course; to embark on so ambitious a venture without keeping the chancellor fully informed would have been worth an officer’s life. Hitler also knew how the kaiser’s Imperial Fleet had been frustrated in the last war, bottled up in the Baltic by the British blockade, with no access to the high seas; and he knew his navy was determined to thwart the Royal Navy in any future conflict by establishing bases in Norway. In October, during a long report to the Führer on Kriegsmarine operations, Raeder had mentioned this objective, and according to Raeder’s Nuremberg testimony, Hitler “saw at once the significance of the Norwegian operation.” After the outbreak of the Russo-Finnish war several weeks later, the Führer also became alert to the danger implicit in reports that the Allies were forming expeditions to support the Finns, a pretext which threatened the lifeblood of his munitions factories in the Ruhr valley, where the smokestack barons needed fifteen million tons of iron ore every year and counted on Sweden for eleven million tons of it. The existence of Weserübung could be misinterpreted by civilians as proof of planned aggression. It wasn’t; professional soldiers in every nation know that during peacetime general staffs draw up plans contemplating hostilities with other powers, even though the likelihood that they will ever be needed is very small. The War Department in Washington, for example, had drafted detailed instructions for invasions of virtually every country on the Continent.¹⁶¹

The fact—established beyond doubt at Nuremberg and in captured documents—was that Hitler did not want to occupy Norway. During his interview with Quisling, which was recorded in shorthand and transcribed, he said that he “would prefer Norway, as well as the rest of Scandinavia, to remain completely neutral”; he was not interested in schemes which would “enlarge the theater of war.” A neutral Norway meant the Reich could import Swedish ore without British interference. There is strong evidence that he impressed this on Raeder; on January 13, the official war diary of the Kriegsmarine mentioned Scandinavia in passing and noted that “the most favorable solution would be the maintenance of Norway’s neutrality.” But both the Führer and his naval staff established caveats. “If the enemy were preparing to spread the war” in Scandinavia, Hitler said, he would “take steps to guard against that threat.” Similarly, the Kriegsmarine’s war diary expressed anxiety that “England intends to occupy Norway with the tacit agreement of the Norwegian government.” The dubious source for this was Quisling, who also told Hitler that the Cossack’s boarding of the Altmark had been prearranged. The government in Oslo, he said, was England’s willing accomplice; the Norwegian gunboats had been ordered to take no action, thereby hoodwinking the Third Reich and its führer. That was the kind of meat upon which this Caesar fed, but the records of his conferences with Raeder show that he was still hesitant, still convinced that “maintenance of Norway’s neutrality is the best thing,” and—this on March 9—that so perilous an operation, pitting his small fleet against the legendary might of the Royal Navy, was “contrary to all the principles of naval warfare.” Yet in that same conference he called the occupation of Norway “dringend”—“urgent.” Ambivalence was not characteristic of the Reich’s supreme Kriegsherr, but he seems to have been indecisive here.¹⁶²

On the last Thursday in March William L. Shirer observed in his diary: “Germany cannot stay in the war unless she continues to receive Swedish iron, most of which is shipped from the Norwegian port of Narvik on German vessels which evade the blockade by feeling their way down the Norwegian coast…. Some of us have wondered why Churchill has never done anything about this. Now it begins to look as if he may.” It was reported in Berlin that “a squadron of at least nine of HM’s destroyers was concentrated off the Norwegian coast and that in several instances Nazi freighters carrying iron had received warning shots.” The Wilhelmstrasse told Shirer they would “watch” Churchill, and a key source assured him that “if British destroyers go into Norwegian territorial waters Germany will act.” Act how? he wondered. “The German navy is no match for the British.”¹⁶³

Evidence that the Royal Navy was closing in had been accumulating since March 13, when a concentration of RN submarines had been reported off Norway. The next day the Germans had intercepted a message alerting all Allied transports to prepare to sail on two hours’ notice; the day after that a party of French officers arrived in Bergen. Hitler did not reach his final decision, however, until Monday, April 1. Signals from Oslo, picked up by Germans monitoring all radio traffic in northern Europe, revealed that Norwegians manning coastal guns and antiaircraft batteries were being instructed to open fire on any unidentified vessels without asking permission from their superiors. Obviously Norway was expecting action and preparing for it. If Weserübung was to achieve surprise—essential to success—the Führer would have to move fast; the invasion was ordered to begin April 9. He prepared his explanation to the international audience: “The government of the Reich has learned that the British intend to land in Norway.”¹⁶⁴

The world outside the Reich, jaded by his gross Lügen, would dismiss this new accusation as another absurd Nazi lie. But for once the Führer was telling the unvarnished truth.

Easter had arrived a week before Hitler’s decision, and after the harsh winter England was celebrating an unseasonably warm four-day weekend. Traffic to Brighton was heavy. Over two hundred visitors were turned away from a hotel in Weston-super-Mare, and Blackpool landladies enjoyed one of their most profitable holidays in memory. Seaside resorts were unusually crowded; Britons hoped to hear warlike sounds over the water, the eruption of an exploding torpedo, perhaps, or the rattle of machine-gun fire. They heard none. Europe was at war but peaceful. The ominous news from Scandinavia attracted little attention. Hitler take Norway? With the Royal Navy barring the way? What a hope! And if he got it, what would he do with it? The British public, editors had learned, regarded Scandinavia as boring.

What they did want was summed up in a Daily Express story headed “COME ON HITLER! DARES IRONSIDE.” The six-foot-four CIGS was in hiding, suffering the mortification of a man blindsided by a clever newspaperman. Reith’s Ministry of Information had persuaded him to grant an interview to an American reporter, suggesting that he paint the rosiest possible picture. Tiny had thought he was talking off the record, and was staggered to learn that the Express owned British rights to whatever the American wrote. And so, to his horror, he found himself quoted as yearning for a clash with the Führer: “We would welcome a go at him. Frankly, we would welcome an attack. We are sure of ourselves. We have no fears.” Actually, he spoke for millions of Englishmen weary of waiting for the monster to make his next move. At No. 10 Colville had wondered, a month after the fall of Poland, “whether all that has happened has been part of a gigantic bluff.” Three months later he noted that a “number of people seem to be thinking that Hitler will not take the offensive, but may even be in a position to win a long war of inactivity—or at least to ruin us economically…. There is thus, for the first time, a feeling that we may have to start the fighting, and Winston even gave a hint to that effect in his speech on Saturday.”¹⁶⁵

In the teeth of vehement Foreign Office opposition, led by Halifax, Churchill since late September 1939 had sought cabinet approval of his plan to mine the Leads “by every means and on all occasions,” as he later put it. The farthest his colleagues would go was on February 19, when they authorized the Admiralty “to make all preparations” to lay a minefield in Norwegian territorial waters so that, should he be given actual approval, “there would be no delay in carrying out the operation.” But ten days later, the authorization was rescinded. The tide turned for Winston on March 28, when the Allied Supreme War Council approved the plan, and on April 1—the day Hitler, unknown to them, gave the green light to Weserübung—the War Cabinet set April 5 for the operation. Churchill decided that because it was “so small and innocent,” the mining operation should be called “Wilfred”—the name of a comic strip character in the Daily Mirror. He pointed out that the minelaying “might lead the Germans to take forcible action against Norwegian territory, and so give us an opportunity for landing forces on Norwegian soil with the consent of the Norwegian government”; and he proposed that “we should continue in a state of readiness to despatch a light force to Narvik.” The Supreme War Council went farther; on April 8 a British brigade and a contingent of French troops would be sent to Narvik to “clear the port and advance to the Swedish frontier.” Other forces would land at Stavanger, Bergen, and Trondheim “to deny these bases to the enemy.”¹⁶⁶

Had this schedule been followed, the Allies would almost certainly have scored a resounding triumph. On April 3 Oliver Stanley, who had succeeded Hore-Belisha at the War Office, received “a somewhat garbled account” that the Germans had “a strong force of troops” at the Baltic port of Rostock. Halifax noted that this “tended to confirm” the latest report from Stockholm, that large German troop concentrations were boarding transports at Stettin and Swinemünde. An assistant military attaché at the Dutch legation in Berlin passed along the same information to the Danes and Norwegians. The Danish foreign minister concluded that the Germans were headed for Norway but would bypass the Danes. The Norwegians believed the Nazis had decided to seize Denmark.¹⁶⁷

On Saturday, April 6, Churchill later wrote, RAF reconnaissance pilots spotted “a German fleet consisting of a battle cruiser, two light cruisers, fourteen destroyers and another ship, probably a transport… moving towards the Naze across the mouth of the Skagerrak.” Churchill wrote: “We found it hard at the Admiralty to believe that this force was going to Narvik. In spite of a report from Copenhagen that Hitler meant to seize that port, it was thought by the Naval Staff that the German ships would probably turn back into the Skagerrak.”¹⁶⁸

Actually, the British were involved in making adjustments to their plans because of a serious disagreement with the French, which had stalled Wilfred at a critical juncture. Churchill said that whatever the French did, England should proceed with the minelaying in Norway, and Chamberlain agreed. “Matters have now gone too far,” he said, “for us not to take action.” One more attempt would be made to reconcile differences with the French. If they continued to be fractious, Britain would go it alone.¹⁶⁹

The row with France arose from French determination to avoid any move which might invite German retaliation. For over seven years they had been trying to wish Hitler away, and the habit was hard to break. Eventually they were bound to disagree with Churchill, who spent most of his waking moments trying to find new ways of making life miserable for the Nazis. One operation, whose potential exceeded Wilfred’s, had been encoded “Royal Marine.” During the winter he had studied mines. Among the various types, he had found, was a fluvial mine which floated just below the surface of water. The possibility of paralyzing all traffic on the Rhine—Germany’s main artery of transport and communications—excited him. Among the river’s many uses was sustaining the Reich’s huge armies on the French frontier. Large numbers of fluvial mines which exploded on contact would be launched on that stretch of the river which lay just inside French territory, below Strasbourg. Among the targets would be tankers, barges, and floating bridges. Winston had conceived this scheme during his visit to the Rhine on the eve of war, but he had hesitated to lay it before the War Cabinet because neutral shipping also used the river. His mind had been changed by the “indiscriminate warfare” of U-boats, magnetic mines, and machine-gunning of crews in lifeboats, all of which had victimized neutrals as well as Britons. Then and later he insisted that, as he wrote General Gamelin, “the moral and juridical justification” for Royal Marine “appears to be complete.” The Germans had “assailed the ports of Great Britain and their approaches with every form of illegal mining,” had attacked unarmed fishing boats, and “waged a ruthless U-boat war on both belligerents and neutrals.” Against such an enemy, he submitted, “stern reprisals are required.” On November 19, 1939, he had proposed that “a steady process of harassing this main waterway of the enemy should be set on foot…. Not a day should be lost.”¹⁷⁰

Months, not days, were lost, for although the War Cabinet endorsed his recommendations “in principle” eight days later, the plan had to work its way through both the British and French bureaucracies. Meantime Royal Marine was expanding; by January the Admiralty had stockpiled ten thousand fluvial mines, the RAF had been brought into the picture as sowers of them, and not only the Rhine, but all major German rivers and canals were to be their targets. Churchill was captivated by his scheme; if padlock visitors called at the private office, one of his aides wrote, Winston would produce “a bucket full of water and insist that everyone should watch the model [of a fluvial mine] work.” The War Cabinet finally approved Royal Marine on March 6, and detailed plans provided for floating the first two thousand mines; three hundred or four hundred would be loosed each night thereafter, and eventually the number would stabilize at two thousand a week. Admiral Jean Darlan, commander in chief of the French navy, declared himself “enthusiastically in favor” of the project and predicted that it would have “a decisive effect” on the war in less than a year. Only pro forma consent of the French government remained.¹⁷¹

It was not forthcoming. Daladier’s government fell on March 20, several days after the Finnish surrender—he had been accused of tardy, inadequate aid to the Finns—and Paul Reynaud became premier. Though no longer premier, Daladier retained his post as minister of defense, and in that office he had the power, which he now exercised, of vetoing Royal Marine. According to gossip at No. 10, Daladier “does not want Reynaud to get the credit, or possibly… the French fear instant retaliation which they are not in a position to withstand.” The second motive was the one given the British. The minister of defense, they were told, flinched from the possibility of reprisals in the form of Luftwaffe attacks on French air factories. The factories were especially vulnerable now. In two months they would be dispersed and the mines could be launched. On March 28, at the same meeting of the Supreme War Council at which Wilfred was approved, Chamberlain intervened, and his powerful promotion of Royal Marine persuaded the French to float the mines on April 4. Back in Paris they changed their minds and demanded a three-month postponement. Colville wrote, “Winston is going over to Paris to do a little personal persuasion. We are trying to blackmail the French by maintaining that we may not undertake the Norwegian territorial waters project unless we can combine it with the other.”¹⁷²

Churchill once observed: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.” Yet it is hard to think of any substantial blow struck for Allied victory by the Third Republic. They were, of course, very courtois when Winston arrived in Paris the evening of April 4; the premier and most of his cabinet dined with the first lord at the British embassy. Unfortunately, the ministre de guerre, “the stumbling-block,” as Churchill called him, did not find it convenient to attend. Next day Winston sought him out and cornered him in the rue St. Dominique. He “commented,” as he later wrote, on Daladier’s “absence from our dinner the night before. He pleaded his previous engagement.” That was the war minister’s last opportunity to say anything else for quite some time, for Churchill unloosed a torrent of arguments in favor of his project: melting snow in the Alps made this the most favorable time of year for the mines; the Rhine traffic was heavy; if the Germans possessed retaliatory weapons they would have used them by now. Nothing worked. The German reaction would be violent, Daladier said when Winston had finished, and the blow would “fall on France.” Churchill reluctantly phoned London and told his colleagues he had decided that to press the French harder would be “a very great mistake.” In reality, a far greater mistake had already been made. Operation Wilfred, the mining of Norwegian ports, had been scheduled for Friday, April 5, with Anglo-French landings to follow. Because of Winston’s trip to Paris, the dates had been set back three days, to begin Monday, April 8. It is startling to read his postwar apologia: “If a few days would enable us to bring the French into agreement upon the punctual execution of the two projects, I was agreeable to postponing ‘Wilfred’ for a few days.” Yet neither project was dependent upon the other; French reluctance to endorse one should not have held the other back, and “punctual execution” was precisely what his trip to Paris lost Wilfred.¹⁷³

The delay proved fatal. Though each was only vaguely aware of the other, the British and the Germans were in a crucial race for Norway, and Falkenhorst and the Kriegsmarine won it in a photo finish. Hankey, then a member of the War Cabinet, later wrote that in their designs on Norway “both Great Britain and Germany were keeping more or less level in their plans and preparations. Britain actually started planning a little earlier…. Both plans were executed almost simultaneously, Britain being twenty-four hours ahead in the so-called act of aggression, if the term is really applicable to either side.” But Germany’s final surge made the difference.¹⁷⁴

Unaware of Nazi intentions, Chamberlain delivered a major political address on Thursday, the day Wilfred was put on hold while Winston traveled to Paris, ending it with four words which were to haunt him and, ultimately, to serve as powerful ammunition in the Tory uprising which would drive him from office. Germany’s preparations at the war’s outbreak, he told a mass meeting of Conservatives, “were far ahead of our own,” and His Majesty’s Government had assumed that “the enemy would take advantage of his initial superiority” and “endeavour to overwhelm us and France” before they could catch up. “Is it not a very extraordinary thing that no such attempt was made? Whatever may be the reason—whether it was that Hitler thought he might get away with what he had got without fighting for it, or whether it was that after all the preparations were not sufficiently complete—however, one thing is certain: he missed the bus.”¹⁷⁵

Hitler had already boarded another bus, which followed its timetable with Teutonic precision on Tuesday, April 9, and at 4:10 A.M. began dropping off its passengers—elements from three Wehrmacht divisions—at their destinations: Denmark and the chief ports of Norway from Oslo right up to Narvik, twelve hundred miles from the nearest Nazi naval base and well above the Arctic Circle. Denmark was overrun in twelve hours. The Norwegian government was busy lodging protests against the British minelaying, which had begun a day earlier—and which Ribbentrop had called “the most flagrant violation of a neutral country [since] the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1801”—but German landings there were not unopposed. At Oslo alone, shore batteries—ancient 28-centimeter guns built, ironically, by Krupp before the turn of the century—sank the heavy cruiser Blücher, permanently damaged the cruiser Emden, and destroyed auxiliary ships.

In London the first reaction to German audacity had been confusion and disbelief. That afternoon in Parliament, Chamberlain confirmed newspaper accounts of enemy landings at Bergen and Trondheim and added: “There have been some reports about a similar landing at Narvik, but I am very doubtful whether they are correct.” It seemed unbelievable that Hitler could have committed himself so far north, particularly when he knew the Royal Navy was present in strength. The Admiralty suggested that “Narvik” must be a misspelling of Larvik, a community on Norway’s south coast. But by evening they knew that forces of the Reich held all major Norwegian ports, including Narvik and Oslo, the country’s capital. Two days later Churchill, his confidence in British sea power undiminished, told the House of Commons that it was his view, “shared by my skilled advisers,” that “Herr Hitler has committed a grave strategic error,” and that “we have greatly gained by what has occurred in Scandinavia.” Having seized defenseless ports, the Führer “will now have to fight” against “Powers possessing vastly superior naval forces.” Winston concluded: “I feel that we are greatly advantaged by… the strategic blunder into which our mortal enemy has been provoked.”¹⁷⁶

Liddell Hart comments: “The dream-castles raised by Churchill” were doomed to “come tumbling down.” To be sure, in almost every surface battle the Royal Navy crippled the fleet Hitler had put at risk. But victory at sea was no longer determined solely by surface engagements. Churchill thought it still was, and so did Admiral Sir Thomas Phillips, who would sacrifice his life for this precept twenty months later in the waters off Malaya. Rear Admiral J. H. Godfrey comments: “Both W.S.C. and Tom Phillips were obsessed with the idea that a fleet or a big ship could provide complete aerial protection with its own A.A. guns.” A vice admiral believes that Pound “was quite as ignorant as we all were before the Second World War as to what aircraft could do to ships. This was quite clear from the Norwegian campaign, where we intended… to send a squadron into Trondheim with no reconnaissance, and with the certainty that they would be bombed.”¹⁷⁷