Finest Years (3 page)

A single column at the right of the main news, on page six, proclaimed: ‘New prime minister. Mr Churchill accepts'. The news-paper's correspondence was dominated by discussion of Parliament's Norway debate three days earlier, which had precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Mr Geoffrey Vickers urged that Lord Halifax was by far the best-qualified minister to lead a national government, assisted by a Labour leader of the Commons. Mr Quintin Hogg, Tory MP for Oxford, noted that many of those who had voted against the government were serving officers. Mr Henry Morris-Jones, Liberal MP for Denbigh, deplored the vote that had taken place, observing complacently that he himself had abstained. The news from France was mocked by a beautiful spring day, with bluebells and primroses everywhere in flower.

‘Chips' Channon, millionaire Tory MP, diarist and consummate ass, wrote on 10 May: ‘
Perhaps the darkest day
in English history…We were all sad, angry and felt cheated and out-witted.' His distress was inspired by the fall of Chamberlain, not the blitzkrieg in France. Churchill himself knew better than any man how grudgingly he had been offered the premiership, and how tenuous was his grasp on power. Much of the Conservative Party hated him, not least because he had twice in his life ‘ratted'—changed sides in the House of Commons. He was remembered as architect of the disastrous 1915 Gallipoli campaign, 1919 sponsor of war against the Bolsheviks in
Russia, 1933-34 opponent of Indian self-government, 1936 supporter of King Edward VIII in the Abdication crisis, savage backbench critic of both Baldwin and Chamberlain, Tory prime ministers through his own ‘wilderness years'.

In May 1940, while few
influential figures questioned Churchill's brilliance or oratorical genius, they perceived his career as wreathed in misjudgements. Robert Rhodes-James subtitled his 1970 biography of Churchill before he ascended to the premiership
A Study in Failure
. As early as 1914, the historian A.G. Gardiner wrote an extraordinarily shrewd and admiring assessment of Churchill, which concluded equivocally: ‘
“Keep your eye on Churchill”
should be the watchword of these days. Remember, he is a soldier first, last and always. He will write his name big on our future. Let us take care he does not write it in blood.'

Now, amidst the crisis precipitated by Hitler's blitzkrieg, Churchill's contemporaries could not forget that he had been wrong about much even in the recent past, and even in the military sphere in which he professed expertise. During the approach to war, he described the presence of aircraft over the battlefield as a mere ‘
additional complication
'. He claimed that modern anti-tank weapons neutered the powers of ‘
the poor tank
', and that ‘
the submarine will be mastered
…There will be losses, but nothing to affect the scale of events.' On Christmas Day 1939 he wrote to Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord: ‘
I feel we may compare
the position now very favourably with that of 1914.' He had doubted that the Germans would invade Scandinavia. When they did so, Churchill told the Commons on 11 April: ‘In my view, which is shared by my skilled advisers, Herr Hitler has committed a grave strategic error in spreading the war so far to the north…We shall take all we want of this Norwegian coast now, with an enormous increase in the facility and the efficiency of our blockade.' Even if some of Churchill's false prophecies and mistaken expressions of confidence were unknown to the public, they were common currency among ministers and commanders.

His claim upon his country's leadership rested not upon his contribution to the war since September 1939, which was equivocal,
but upon his personal character and his record as a foe of appeasement. He was a warrior to the roots of his soul, who found his being upon battlefields. He was one of the few British prime ministers to have killed men with his own hand—at Omdurman in 1898. Now he wielded a sword symbolically, if no longer physically, amid a British body politic dominated by men of paper, creatures of committees and conference rooms. ‘
It may well be
,' he enthused six years before the war, ‘that the most glorious chapters of our history have yet to be written. Indeed, the very problems and dangers that encompass us and our country ought to make English men and women of this generation glad to be here at such a time. We ought to rejoice at the responsibilities with which destiny has honoured us, and be proud that we are guardians of our country in an age when her life is at stake.' Leo Amery had written in March 1940: ‘
I am beginning to come round
to the idea that Winston with all his failings is the one man with real war drive and love of battle.' So he was, of course. But widespread fears persisted, that this erratic genius might lead Britain in a rush towards military disaster.

Few of the ministers whom he invited to join his all-party coalition were equal to the magnitude of their tasks. If this is true of all governments at all times, it was notably unfortunate now. Twenty-one out of thirty-six senior office-holders were, like Halifax, David Margesson, Kingsley Wood and Chamberlain himself, veterans of the previous discredited administration. ‘
Winston has not been
nearly bold enough with his changes and is much too afraid of the [Conservative] Party,' wrote Amery, who had led the Commons charge against Chamberlain.

Of the Labour recruits—notably Clement Attlee, A.V. Alexander, Hugh Dalton, Arthur Greenwood and Ernest Bevin—only Bevin was a personality of the first rank, though Attlee as deputy prime minister would provide a solid bulwark. Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Liberal leader who had served as an officer under Churchill in France in 1916 and now became Secretary for Air, was described by those contemptuous of his subservience to the new prime minister as ‘head of school's fag'. Churchill's personal supporters who received office
or promotion, led by Anthony Eden, Lord Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken and Amery, were balefully regarded not only by Chamberlain loyalists, but also by many sensible and informed people who were willing to support the new prime minister, but remained sceptical of his associates.

Much of the political class thought Churchill's administration would be short-lived. ‘
So at last that man
has gained his ambition,' an elderly Tory MP, Cuthbert Headlam, noted sourly. ‘I never thought he would. Well—let us hope that he makes good. I have never believed in him. I only hope that my judgement…will be proved wrong.' The well-known military writer Captain Basil Liddell Hart wrote gloomily on 11 May: ‘
The new War Cabinet
appears to be a group devoted to “victory” without regard to its practical possibility.' Lord Hankey, veteran Whitehall
éminence grise
and a member of the new government, thought it ‘
perfectly futile for war
' and Churchill himself a ‘rogue elephant'.

Even as Hitler's Panzer columns drove for Sedan and pushed onward through Holland and Belgium, Churchill was filling lesser government posts, interviewing new ministers, meeting officials. On the evening of 10 May Sir Edward Bridges, the shy, austere Cabinet Secretary, called at Admiralty House, where Churchill still occupied the desk from which he had presided as First Lord. Bridges decided that it would be unbecoming for an official who until that afternoon had been serving a deposed prime minister, too obsequiously to welcome the new one. He merely said cautiously: ‘
May I wish you every possible
good fortune?' Churchill grunted, gazed intently at Bridges for a moment, then said: ‘Hum. “Every good fortune!” I like that! These other people have all been congratulating me. Every good fortune!'

At Churchill's first meeting with the chiefs of staff as prime minister on 11 May, he made two interventions, both trifling: he asked whether the police should be armed when sent to arrest enemy aliens, and he pondered the likelihood of Sweden joining the war on the Allied side. Even this most bellicose of men did not immediately attempt
to tinker with the movements of Britain's army on the Continent. When Eden, the new Secretary for War, called on the prime minister that day, he noted in his diary that Churchill ‘
seemed well satisfied
with the way events were shaping'. If these words reflected a failure to perceive the prime minister's inner doubts, it is certainly true that he did not perceive the imminence of disaster.

Churchill cherished a faith in the greatness of France, the might of her armed forces, most touching in a statesman of a nation traditionally wary of its Gallic neighbour. ‘
In Winston's eyes
,' wrote his doctor later, ‘France is civilisation.' Even after witnessing the German conquest of Poland and Scandinavia, Churchill understood little about the disparity between the relative fighting powers of Hitler's Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, and those of the French and British armies and air forces. He, like almost all his advisers, deemed it unthinkable that the Germans could achieve a breakthrough against France's Maginot Line and the combined mass of French, British, Dutch and Belgian forces.

In the days that followed his ascent to Downing Street on 10 May, Churchill set about galvanising the British machinery of war and government for a long haul. As war leader, he expected to preside over Britain's part in a massive and protracted clash on the Continent. His foremost hope was that this would entail no such slaughter as that which characterised the 1914-18 conflict. If he cherished no expectation of swift victory, he harboured no fear of decisive defeat. On 13 May, headlines in
The Times
asserted confidently: ‘BRITISH FORCES MOVING ACROSS BELGIUM—SUCCESSFUL ENCOUNTERS WITH ENEMY—RAF STRIKES AGAIN'.

Addressing the Commons that day, the prime minister apologised for his brevity: ‘I hope that…my friends…will make allowance, all allowance, for any lack of ceremony with which it has been necessary to act…We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering…But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say: “Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.” '

Churchill's war speeches are usually quoted in isolation. This obscures the bathos of remarks by backbench MPs which followed those of the prime minister. On 13 May, Major Sir Philip Colfox, West Dorset, said that although the country must now pursue national unity, he himself much regretted that Neville Chamberlain had been removed from the premiership. Sir Irving Albery, Gravesend, recalled the new prime minister's assertion: ‘My policy is a policy of war.' Albery said he thought it right to praise his predecessor's commitment to the cause of peace. Colonel John Gretton, Burton, injected a rare note of realism by urging the House not to waste words, when ‘the enemy is almost battering at our gates'. The bleakest indication of the Conservative Party's temper came from the fact that while Neville Chamberlain was cheered as he entered the chamber that day, Churchill's appearance was greeted with resentful Tory silence.

This, his first important statement, received more applause from abroad than it did from some MPs. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
editorialised: ‘
He proved in this
one short speech that he was not afraid to face the truth and tell it. He proved himself an honest man as well as a man of action. Britain has reason to be enheartened by his brevity, his bluntness and his courage.'
Time
magazine wrote: ‘
That smart, tough, dumpy little man
, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, knows how to face facts…Great Britain's tireless old firebrand has changed the character of Allied warmongering.'

That day, 13 May, the threat of German air attack on Britain caused Churchill to make his first significant military decision: he rejected a proposal for further fighter squadrons to be sent to France to reinforce the ten already committed. But while the news from the Continent was obviously bleak, he asserted that he was ‘by no means sure that the great battle was developing'. He still cherished hopes of turning the tide in Norway, signalling to Admiral Lord Cork and Orrery on 14 May: ‘I hope you will get Narvik cleaned up as soon as possible, and then work southward with increasing force.'

Yet the Germans were already bridging the Meuse at Sedan and Dinant, south of Brussels, for their armoured columns emerging from the Ardennes forests. A huge gap was opening between the
French Ninth Army, which was collapsing, and the Second on its left. Though the BEF in Belgium was still not seriously engaged, its C-in-C Lord Gort appealed for air reinforcements. Gort commanded limited confidence. Like all British generals, he lacked training and instincts for the handling of large forces. One of the army's cleverest staff officers, Colonel Ian Jacob of the war cabinet secretariat, wrote: ‘
We have for twenty years
thought little about how to win big campaigns on land; we have been immersed in our day-to-day imperial police activities.'

This deficiency, of plausible ‘big battlefield' commanders, would dog British arms throughout the war. Gort was a famously brave officer who had won a VC in World War I, and still carried himself with a boyish enthusiasm. Maj.Gen. John Kennedy, soon to become Director of Military Operations at the War Office, described the BEF's C-in-C as ‘a fine fighting soldier'—a useful testimonial for a platoon commander. In blunter words, the general lacked brains, as do most men possessed of the suicidal courage necessary to win a Victoria Cross or Medal of Honor. A shrewd American categorised both Gort and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Edmund Ironside, as ‘
purely physical soldiers
who had no business in such high places'. Yet Sir Alan Brooke or Sir Bernard Montgomery would have been no more capable of averting disaster in 1940, with the small forces available to the BEF. Unlike most of Continental Europe, Britain had no peacetime conscription for military service until 1939, and thus no large potential reserves for mobilisation. The army Gort commanded was, in spirit, the imperial constabulary of inter-war years, starved of resources for a generation.