Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ noted in his diary on the 25th, ‘no communications and no one knows what’s going on, except that everything’s black as black.’

      Churchill cabled to the Dominion prime ministers, warning that an invasion of Britain might be imminent. He rejoiced that reinforcements from the Empire were on their way, and asserted his confidence that the Royal Navy and RAF should be able to frustrate an assault, following which ‘our land defence will deal with any sea-borne survivors after some rough work’. He rejected the notion of a public appeal to the United States. He feared, surely correctly, that such a message would have scant appeal to a nation already disposed to dismiss aid to Britain as wasted motion. In this, as in his judgement of shifting American moods through the months that followed, he displayed much wisdom. A Gallup poll showed Americans still overwhelmingly opposed, by thirteen to one, to participation in the European conflict.

      On 25 May, Churchill dispatched a personal message to Brigadier Claude Nicholson, commanding the British force in Calais, ordering that his men must fight to the end. The Belgians were collapsing. Gort cancelled his last planned counter-attack southward, instead sending north the two divisions earmarked for it, to plug the gap between British and Belgian forces. That evening, at a meeting of the Defence Committee, Churchill accepted the conclusion which Gort, now out of contact with London, had already reached and begun to act upon. The BEF must withdraw to the coast for evacuation. The commander-in-chief’s order, issued in advance of consent from Britain, represented his most notable contribution to the campaign, and by no means a negligible one. The prime minister ordered that six skeleton divisions in Britain should be urgently prepared for active service, though scant means existed to accomplish this. Artillery, anti-tank weapons, transport, even small arms were lacking. He acknowledged that France’s leaders, resigned to defeat, would probably depose Reynaud and make terms with Hitler. Henceforward, the future of the French fleet was much in his mind. In German hands, these warships might drastically improve the odds favouring a successful invasion of Britain. That night, Ironside resigned as CIGS, to become commander-in-chief home forces. The general had never commanded Churchill’s confidence, while Sir John Dill, Ironside’s vice-chief, did. Next day Dill, fifty-nine years old, clever and sensitive though seldom in good health, became head of the British Army.

      At 9 o’clock on the morning of the 26th, Churchill told the war cabinet there was a good chance of ‘getting off a considerable proportion of the British Expeditionary Force’. Paul Reynaud arrived in London. He warned the prime minister over lunch that if Germany occupied a large part of France, the nation’s old hero Marshal Philippe Pétain would probably call for an armistice. Reynaud dismissed British fears that the Germans were bent on an immediate invasion of their island. Hitler would strike for Paris, he said, and of course he was right. Churchill told Reynaud that Britain would fight on, whatever transpired. Following a break while he met the war cabinet, the two leaders resumed their talks. Churchill pressed for Weygand to issue an order for the BEF to fall back on the coast. This was designed to frustrate charges of British betrayal. Reynaud duly requested such a message, to endorse the reality of what was already taking place.

      At a four-hour war cabinet meeting that afternoon, following Reynaud’s departure, the merits of seeking a settlement with Hitler were discussed. Churchill hoped that France might receive terms that precluded her occupation by the Germans. Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, expressed his desire to seek Italian mediation with Hitler, to secure terms for Britain. He had held preliminary talks with Mussolini’s ambassador in London about such a course. Churchill was sceptical, saying this presupposed that a deal might be made merely by returning Germany’s old colonies, and making concessions in the Mediterranean. ‘No such option was open to us,’ said the prime minister.

Six Alexander Cadogan, who joined the meeting after half an hour, found Churchill ‘too rambling and romantic and sentimental and temperamental’. This was harsh. The prime minister bore vast burdens. It behoved him to be circumspect in all dealings with the old appeasers among his colleagues. There were those in Whitehall who, rather than being stirred by Churchill’s appeals to recognise a great historic moment, curled their lips. Chamberlain’s private secretary, Arthur Rucker, responded contemptuously to the ringing phrases in one of the prime minister’s missives: ‘He is still thinking of his books.’ Eric Seal, the only one of Churchill’s private secretaries who established no close rapport with him,^* muttered about ‘blasted rhetoric’.

      A substantial part of the British ruling class, MPs and peers alike, had since September 1939 lacked faith in the possibility of military victory. Although Churchill was himself an aristocrat, he was widely mistrusted by his own kind. Since the 1917 Russian Revolution, many British grandees, including such dukes as Westminster, Wellington and Buccleuch, and such lesser peers as Lord Phillimore, had shown themselves much more hostile to Soviet communism than to European fascism. Their patriotism was never in doubt. However, their enthusiasm for a fight to the finish with Hitler, which they feared would end in rubble and ruin, was less assured. Lord Hankey observed acidly before making a speech to the House of Lords early in May that he ‘would be addressing most of the members of the Fifth Column’.

      Lord Tavistock, soon to become Duke of Bedford, a pacifist and plausible quisling, wrote to former prime minister David Lloyd George that Hitler’s strength was ‘so great…it is madness to suppose we can beat him by war on the continent’. On 15 May, Tavistock urged Lloyd George that peace should be made ‘now rather than later…If the Germans received fair peace terms a dozen Hitlers could never start another war on an inadequate…pretext.’ Likewise, some financial magnates in the City of London were sceptical of any possibility of British victory, and thus of Churchill. Harold Nicolson wrote: ‘It is not the descendants of the old governing classes who display the greatest enthusiasm for their leader…Mr Chamberlain is the idol of the business men…They do not have the same personal feelings for Mr Churchill…There are awful moments when they feel that Mr Churchill does not find them interesting.’

      There were also defeatists lower down the social scale. Muriel Green, who worked at her family’s garage in Norfolk, recorded a conversation at a local tennis match with a grocer’s roundsman and a schoolmaster on 23 May. ‘I think they’re going to beat us, don’t you?’ said the roundsman. ‘Yes,’ said the schoolmaster. He added that as the Nazis were very keen on sport, he expected ‘we’d still be able to play tennis if they did win’. Muriel Green wrote: ‘J said Mr M. was saying we should paint a swastika under the door knocker ready. We all agreed we shouldn’t know what to do if they invade. After that we played tennis, very hard exciting play for 2 hrs, and forgot all about the war.’

      In those last days of May, the prime minister must have perceived a real possibility, even a likelihood, that if he himself appeared irrationally intransigent, the old Conservative grandees would reassert themselves. Amid the collapse of all the hopes on which Britain’s military struggle against Hitler were founded, it was not fanciful to suppose that a peace party might gain control in Britain. Some historians have made much of the fact that at this war cabinet meeting Churchill failed to dismiss out of hand an approach to Mussolini. He did not flatly contradict Halifax when the Foreign Secretary said that if the Duce offered terms for a general settlement ‘which did not postulate the destruction of our independence…we should be foolish if we did not accept them’. Churchill conceded that ‘if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies, he would jump at it’. At the following day’s war cabinet he indicated that if Hitler was prepared to offer peace in exchange for the restoration of his old colonies and the overlordship of central Europe, a negotiation could be possible.

      It seems essential to consider Churchill’s СКАЧАТЬ