Gandhi & Churchill (81 page)

If the Congress followed his formula exactly, like a patient obeying a doctor, he said, “I shall march forth and then I shall have no doubts about victory.” But “if you are not prepared to follow this path,” he added with words that tolled out across the crowd, “please leave me alone.” He told the astonished delegates that he would not look on such an outcome as a defeat; “the word ‘defeat’ is not in my dictionary.” But “I am not prepared to do anything for which I will have to repent.”
³⁶

The members of Congress could cheer him. They revered him. But they could no longer follow him. They wanted and needed him to lead a civil disobedience campaign, but only as political leverage, not as a prelude to a national moral transformation. His stern summons to action, so reminiscent of Churchill, fell on deaf ears. Instead of accepting Gandhi’s program, they chose to hold out for a compromise. Three days later the Muslim League announced its Lahore Resolution. Gandhi watched helplessly as two more months of debate and equivocation finally, in the first week of July 1940, yielded an offer to the British government.

Rajagopalachari, Nehru, and the Congress pledged full support for the war effort in exchange for Britain’s declaration that India would be free at the war’s end and creation of a National Government of Indian ministry. Gandhi said, “If Rajaji’s draft reflects the Congress’s mind, it must be accepted.” Characteristically, Nehru at the last minute changed “war effort” to “defense of the country”—a much narrower offer. But Gandhi still said, “I feel [it] will be accepted by the Government.”
³⁷

It was too late. If the offer had come two months earlier, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Zetland at the India Office might have considered it. But with the new prime minister who had taken office on May 10, it had no chance. He was none other than Gandhi’s nemesis, Winston Churchill.

Chapter Twenty-four

FROM NARVIK TO BARDOLI

April 1940–December 1941

Even if Nazi legions stood triumphant on the Black Sea, or indeed the Caspian, even if Hitler were at the gates of India, it would profit him nothing.

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1940

W
HEN HE FINALLY PUSHED OPEN THE
door of 10 Downing Street as prime minister in May 1940 at age sixty-five, Churchill was already facing a major crisis in the war in Europe. Ironically, it was a crisis largely of his own making.

In September the previous year, when the war was not yet five hours old, he had taken his post in Chamberlain’s War Cabinet. Sitting with him were his old opponents from the India Act. Sir John Simon was now secretary of the Treasury, and Sir Samuel Hoare was now Lord Privy Seal. Also at the table were Sir Kingsley Wood (minister of air), Leslie Hore-Belisha (war), and Maurice Hankey, not to mention Neville Chamberlain: men he had publicly excoriated for their stand on appeasement, first in India and then in Europe. They in turn viewed him with deep distrust, if not real hatred. “I shall never forgive Winston,” Hoare had written after their battle over India. “He and his friends are completely unscrupulous. They stick at nothing.”
¹
Winston, for his part, was willing to let bygones be bygones for sake of the war effort.

The new First Lord of the Admiralty arrived ready for action. Unfortunately, there was little action to take. The only fighting was in Poland, where the Germans were already making massive headway. Britain’s French ally resisted making a strong demonstration against the Germans on its western border, out of fear the Allies would do as badly as the Poles.

In a matter of three weeks Poland collapsed. France and Britain settled into the so-called “phony war,” with no discernible activity on either side of the western frontier. As the stalemate dragged on for weeks and then months, Churchill (not surprisingly) grew restless.

At the Admiralty, Churchill kept busy organizing the largest fleet in the world for war. But “I could not rest content with the policy of ‘convoy and blockade,’” he wrote later. “I sought earnestly for a way to attack Germany by naval means.” In fact, he was looking for his next Gallipoli moment. What others had thought the First World War’s biggest disaster, he still considered a missed opportunity and a model of how to “make the enemy wonder where he is going to [be] hit next.”
²
Winston was not willing to let the opportunity slip away again.

This time the thumb and cigar moved northward across the Admiralty maps, to Norway. The cabinet already had a plan afoot for sending troops to reinforce the Finns in their life-or-death struggle against Hitler’s ally, Stalin. Churchill pushed to expand the operation to include mining the major Norwegian ports, especially Narvik, in order to sever German access to iron ore from Sweden. The Finns surrendered before the relief expedition could leave, but the Norway plan remained an idée fixe in Churchill’s mind.

What Chamberlain had always feared would happen if Churchill joined the cabinet, happened. His brisk arguments swept aside the doubts of Hore-Belisha, Wood, and the rest. When the German fleet came out to Narvik to clear the mines, he confidently predicted, the Royal Navy could pounce. British and French troops could occupy the principal Norwegian ports, and Hitler’s fate in the north would be sealed. He even convinced Chamberlain to appoint him head of the Military Coordinating Committee, so he could oversee every detail of what would become Plan R-4: the mining of Norwegian waters, then the deployment of troops to occupy Narvik and Trondheim once Germans violated Norwegian neutrality. The cabinet set the date for the operation to begin on April 8, 1940.

In fact, it was Gallipoli all over again. What the cabinet did not know, and could not have known, was that the Germans were planning on doing exactly the same thing. Hitler had shrewdly guessed that Norway’s deep fjords and snug protected harbors would attract Churchill’s wandering eye.
³
So he organized his own Norway invasion force, which sailed on April 9—a day before the British. The two expeditions, with their fleets of destroyers, cruisers, and transports, missed each other in the North Sea, although both suspected the presence of the other. The Germans, however, reached the Norwegian coast first.

They suffered some initial setbacks. Alert Norwegian shore guns knocked out the German heavy cruiser
Blücher,
which sank, carrying two thousand soldiers and sailors to their deaths. A British submarine sank another German cruiser and aircraft crippled a pocket battleship, the
Lützow
. Royal Navy Captain Henry Warburton-Lee led a gallant dash with his destroyer flotilla to keep the Germans out of Narvik, which cost him his life but sank two German destroyers and damaged five more. British and French troops were poised to begin their landings.

Then everything began to go wrong. The Germans got their troops ashore first and took Norway’s principal cities; at the same time they occupied Denmark. Twenty-five-year-old John Colville was Chamberlain’s cabinet secretary that blustery April when the Narvik campaign was announced. He, like every one else in Downing Street, watched the huge map of Scandinavia that hung in the prime minister’s office with obsessive attention, hungry for any news. As early as the ninth he was learning that “we, who started the whole business, seem to have lost the initiative.” Of course, “if we can secure a naval victory the balance will be redressed in our favor.” However, “bad visibility and a heavy sea” were hampering British vessels. According to the government’s chief whip, “The whole thing seems to be ‘rather a fog.’”
⁴

The fog would get worse, in every sense. Over the next several days Colville learned that the landing of British and French troops had been botched from the start, that the Germans had managed to recover and retake key positions, and that the Supreme War Council was finally forced to consider pulling out of Norway with its tail between its legs.

On April 24, as Colville watched, a disillusioned Chamberlain stood before the great map, where colored pins were being moved from point to point. Chamberlain was “depressed more by Winston’s rampages” than by the growing problems in Norway. “I have an uneasy feeling,” Colville wrote, “that all is not being as competently handled as it might be.” If a full-scale evacuation became necessary, “I think the psychological cost would be considerable.”
⁵

Colville was right. The evacuation began. The colored pins came off the map and were put away. The public, and Parliament, demanded that someone pay for the botched expedition. Churchill could already feel the fingers pointing at him, just as after Gallipoli. “I certainly bore an exceptional measure of responsibility for the brief and disastrous Norwegian campaign,” he wrote after the war, “if campaign it can be called.”
⁶
It had resulted in far fewer casualties than had Gallipoli and no losses large enough to poison relations with a Dominion like Australia. Nonetheless, Churchill braced himself for the inevitable onslaught in the press and on the floor of the House of Commons.

But this time the fingers pointed not at him but at Chamberlain. The public saw the Norway campaign, far from being too bold, as smacking of the hesitancy and half-hearted measures typical of the man forever branded as Hitler’s appeaser. In the opinion of Colville (no Churchill admirer), “The country believes that Winston is the man of action who is winning the war.” Colville disagreed, but in the end the country was right.
⁷
Churchill at least had a thirst, if not yet the right strategy, for victory. Chamberlain had a yearning only for peace and it showed in the Norway debacle.

So on May 3, as the reality of failure sank in, the leaders of the opposition parties asked for a debate on the Norway campaign and its leadership. Churchill thought giving in to their demands would be a mistake. But Chamberlain said “it was out of the question to cancel the public debate” on so momentous an issue and agreed to it—thus sealing his own fate.
⁸
On Tuesday, May 7, a steady rain of accusations fell on his head from all sides, even from his own party. The Labour deputy leader Arthur Greenwood admitted, “I have never known the House in graver mood.”

The next day the debate took on the atmosphere of a vote of censure or no confidence. In a dramatic gesture Admiral Roger Keyes, member for North Portsmouth, appeared in his naval uniform and decorations to castigate the government for throwing away “a priceless chance” by its procrastination and timidity.
⁹
To his credit, Churchill tried to take some of the blame for what happened. “I take the fullest responsibility,” he said, for listening to the advice of the experts on the Norway incursion. “I thought they were right at the time…and I have seen no reason to alter my view by what I have learned since.”
¹⁰

But the anger of the House was directed not at him but squarely at Chamberlain. Once again it was Churchill’s old acquaintance Leo Amery whose intervention proved decisive. He dismissed Chamberlain’s careful explanations of why the Norway campaign had failed: “It is always possible to do that after every failure. Making a case and winning a war are not the same thing.” Then he finished by quoting Oliver Cromwell, who had said, when the Rump Parliament was dismissed in 1653: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

It was what everyone was thinking. “I had driven the nail home,” Amery realized, and the next day Chamberlain was fighting for his political life.
¹¹
Churchill finished the debate with an eloquent forty-five-minute defense of Chamberlain and again tried to place the blame on his own shoulders. But the other members would have none of it. Duff Cooper, who had resigned in protest after Munich, said Churchill was “defending with his eloquence those who have so long refused to listen to his counsel, who treated his warnings with contempt”—meaning not only Norway but Munich and before.

After Churchill spoke, members filed into the corridor as the division for a vote of no confidence took place. When they returned, the atmosphere was electric. Ears and heads strained as the government’s chief whip read out the result in a faltering voice. Chamberlain had won, but by only eighty-one votes. Experts had estimated he needed at least one hundred to stay in office. Thirty-three Tories had voted against their own party leader, and another sixty had deliberately abstained.

There was a tremendous gasp, and then shouts of “resign, resign.” Chamberlain stood up—“erect, unyielding, sardonic,” Leo Amery remembered—and walked out without a word. All around him the House was in chaos, as Labour members chanted over and over: “Go, in God’s name go!”
¹²

Chamberlain was finished. The morning of the ninth he tried without success to convince Labour to join him in a National Government. Labour flatly refused: they would serve with someone else but not him. Afterward Chamberlain confessed to Churchill that he might have to resign.
¹³
The question on his and everyone else’s mind was, who would take his place?

Chamberlain and many other Conservatives had their candidate: Lord Halifax. Not only was he foreign minister, but his reputation, unaccountably, had survived the shipwreck of Munich. He was popularly viewed as a rock of integrity and diplomatic wisdom—in sharp contrast to the man many feared was the other leading candidate, Winston Churchill. “One can’t speak of them in the same breath,” Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, a Halifax friend and daughter of Lord Curzon, wrote. “I am terrified of Winston.”
¹⁴
Many patriotic people agreed, including the king and queen of England.