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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ came in to say that he’d told Sir Walter Monckton of all our misgivings about the higher direction of the war.’ And again on the 23rd: ‘Our cabinet with that idiot Winston in charge changes its mind every 24 hours…I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that we’re so inept we don’t deserve to win & indeed are almost certain to be defeated. We never do anything right.’ Through the lonely eighteen months ahead, Churchill was galled that such scourges as Aneurin Bevan MP taxed him in the Commons with unwelcome facts of which he was thoroughly aware, painful realities such as he confronted every hour. From the outset, while he always insisted that victory would come, his personal prestige rested upon the honesty with which he acknowledged to the British people the gravity of the ordeal they faced.

      Churchill told MPs on 4 June: ‘Our thankfulness at the escape of our Army and so many men, whose loved ones have passed through an agonising week, must not blind us to the fact that what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster. I have myself full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government.’ After the prime minister sat down, as always exchanges between MPs degenerated into commonplaces. Dr Lees-Smith delivered words of appreciation. Glaswegian maverick Jimmy Maxton, an Independent Labour MP, raised a point of order, which led to cross words and pettiness. Captain Bellenger of Bassetlaw rebuked Mr Thorne of Plaistow, whom Bellenger believed had impugned his courage: ‘You have no right to make remarks of that kind.’

      Clausewitz wrote in 1811: ‘A government must never assume that its country’s fate, its whole existence, hangs on the outcome of a single battle, no matter how decisive.’ Churchill’s conduct after the fall of France exasperated some sceptics who perceived themselves as clear thinkers, but conformed perfectly to the Prussian’s dictum. His supreme achievement in 1940 was to mobilise Britain’s warriors, to shame into silence its doubters, to stir the passions of the nation, so that for a season the British people faced the world united and exalted. The ‘Dunkirk spirit’ was not spontaneous. It was created by the rhetoric and bearing of one man, displaying powers that will define political leadership for the rest of time. Under a different prime minister, the British people in their shock and bewilderment could as readily have been led in another direction. Nor was the mood long-lived. It persisted only until winter, when it was replaced by a more dogged, doubtful and less exuberant national spirit. But that first period was decisive: ‘If we can get through the next three months, we can get through the next three years,’ Churchill told the Commons on 20 June.

      Kingsley Martin argued in that week’s New Statesman that Churchill’s 18 June ‘finest hour’ broadcast to the nation was too simplistic: ‘He misunderstood [the British people’s] feelings when he talked of this as the finest moment of their history. Our feelings are more complex than that. To talk to common people in or out of uniform is to discover that determination to defend this island is coupled with a deep and almost universal bitterness that we have been reduced to such a pass.’ Yet the prime minister judged the predominant mood much more shrewdly than the veteran socialist. In 1938 the British had not been what Churchill wanted them to be. In 1941 and thereafter they would often disappoint his hopes. But in 1940, to an extraordinary degree he was able to shape and elevate the nation to fulfil his aspirations.

      Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in the New Yorker of 29 June:

      It would be difficult for an impartial observer to decide today whether the British are the bravest or merely the most stupid people in the world. The way they are acting in the present situation could be used to support either claim. The individual Englishman seems to be singularly unimpressed by the fact that there is now nothing between him and the undivided attention of a war machine such as the world has never seen before. Possibly it’s lack of imagination; possibly again it’s the same species of dogged resolution which occasionally produces an epic like Dunkirk. Millions of British families, sitting at their wellstocked breakfast tables eating excellent British eggs and bacon, can still talk calmly of the horrors across the Channel, perhaps without fully comprehending even now that anything like that could ever happen in England’s green and pleasant land.

      Many Americans, by contrast, thought it unlikely that Britain would survive. In New York, ‘one thing that strikes me is the amount of defeatist talk’, wrote US General Raymond Lee, ‘the almost pathological assumption that it is all over bar the shouting…that it is too late for the United States to do anything’. Key Pittman, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on Churchill to send the British fleet to the New World: ‘It is no secret that Great Britain is totally unprepared for defense and that nothing the US has to give can do more than delay the result…It is to be hoped that this plan will not to be too delayed by futile encouragement to fight on. It is conclusively evident that Congress will not authorize intervention in the European war.’ Time magazine reported on 1 July: ‘So scared was many a US citizen last week that he wanted to shut off aid to Britain for fear that the US would weaken its own defenses, wanted to have the US wash its hands of help for Britain, for fear of getting involved on the losing side.’

      A Fortune opinion survey showed that even before France collapsed, most Americans believed that Germany would win the war. Only 30.3 per cent saw any hope for the Allies. A correspondent named Herbert Jones wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer which reflected widespread sentiment: ‘The great majority of Americans are not pacifists or isolationists, but, after the experience of the last war and Versailles, have no desire to pull Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire for her, under the slogan of “Save the World for Democracy”. They rightly feel that that little is to be gained by pouring out our money and the lives of our young men for the cause of either the oppressor of the Jews and Czechs or the oppressor of the Irish and of India…’ Richard E. Taylor of Apponaugh, Rhode Island, wrote to a friend in England urging him to draw the attention of the authorities to the danger that the Germans might tunnel under the Channel.

      Yet some Americans did not despair. An ‘aid to Britain’ committee gathered three million signatures on petitions to the White House. The organisation spawned a Historians’ Committee under Charles Seymour of Yale; a Scientists’ Committee under Nobel Prize-winner Harold Urey; a Theatre Committee under playwright and Roosevelt speechwriter Robert Sherwood. Americans were invited to set aside their caricature view of Britain as a nation of stuffed-shirt sleepyheads, and to perceive instead battling champions of freedom. Novelist Somerset Maugham, arriving in New York, predicted a vastly different post-war Britain, and hinted at the beginnings of one more sympathetic to an American social vision: ‘I have a feeling…that in the England of the future evening dress will be less important than it has been in the past.’ America was still far, far from belligerence, but forces favouring intervention were stirring.

      In 1941 Churchill devoted immense energy to wooing the US. But in 1940, once his June appeals to Roosevelt had failed, for several weeks he did not write to the president at all, and dismissed suggestions for a British propaganda offensive. ‘Propaganda is all very well,’ he said, ‘but it is events that make the world. If we smash the Huns here, we shall need no propaganda in the United States…Now we must live. Next year we shall be winning. The year after that we shall triumph. But if we can hold the Germans in this coming month of July…our position will be quite different from today.’

      But how to ‘hold them’? the anglophile General Raymond Lee, military attaché at the London embassy, wrote: ‘One queer thing about the present situation is that it СКАЧАТЬ