The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (263 page)

They made their way, Churchill wrote, “to the shelter assigned to us.” It lay a hundred yards down the street, “an open basement, not even sandbagged,” as he described it, already occupied by the tenants of a half-dozen flats. “Everyone was cheerful and jocular,” he recalled, “as is the English manner when about to encounter the unknown.” But according to Fritz Günther von Tschirschky, a German refugee, Churchill himself was less than jolly. Tschirschky remained outside the shelter, feeling a German would not be welcome, until Clemmie, who knew him, insisted he come down. There he found Churchill “in a great state of indignation, stamping his foot, complaining that there was no telephone and no portable wireless, and saying the Germans would have much better organized air raid shelters.” Tschirschky volunteered that there was a portable radio in his flat, and Churchill said: “You Germans are so damned efficient—please be kind enough to fetch it.” But just then the wailing was heard again. Churchill afterward remembered that he “was not sure that this was not a reiteration of the previous warning, but a man came running along the street shouting ‘All Clear.’ ”
²¹⁷

Parliament met at noon, and as Churchill crossed the lobby he was handed a note from the prime minister asking him to call on him “as soon as the debate died down.” It wasn’t much of a debate. The issue which had divided them had been resolved. The prime minister, speaking first, called the day “a sad day”; then, having turned overnight from dove to hawk, added: “I hope I may live to see the day when Hitlerism has been destroyed.” Greenwood, speaking for Labour, told the House that the “intolerable agony of suspense” had ended and saluted the gallant Poles, “now fighting for survival.” More cheers. Churchill, scheduled as the third speaker, wrote afterward that “as I sat in my place, listening to the speeches, a very strong sense of calm came over me, after the intense passions and excitements of the last few days. I felt a serenity of mind and was conscious of a kind of uplifted detachment from human and personal affairs. The glory of Old England, peace-loving and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation. I tried to convey some of this mood to the House when I spoke.”
²¹⁸

Parliament remembered his years of warnings, his denunciation of Munich, the countless scenes in which he had been hooted and jeered and mocked when he tried to tell them of Nazi Germany’s growing military superiority and the threat to them and their island. He had anticipated this more than six years ago and never was a man more entitled to remind them that he had told them so. But his friends knew him incapable of that. “If we quarrel with the past,” he had said, “we may lose the future.” It is fair to add that he had high hopes of his imminent meeting with the prime minister. Bitterness now could sour his prospects then. So he began by declaring: “In this solemn hour it is a consolation to recall and to dwell upon our repeated efforts for peace. All have been ill-starred, but all have been faithful and sincere…. Outside, the storms of war may blow and the lands may be lashed with the fury of its gales, but in our own hearts this Sunday morning there is peace…. Our consciences are at rest.”
²¹⁹

He warned them to expect “many disappointments, and many unpleasant surprises,” but added, “We may be sure that the task which we have freely accepted is not one beyond the compass and strength of the British Empire and the French Republic.” It was hardly true that Chamberlain had freely accepted it, and at hour four France was still at peace, but mention of the Empire was greeted with a murmur of approval; within the hour Australia and New Zealand had declared war on Germany while the other Dominions prepared to follow. Churchill noted that the prime minister had said it was “a sad day,” and so it was, but “there is another note which may be present,” a sense of gratitude that a new generation of Britons was “ready to prove itself not unworthy of the days of yore and not unworthy of those great men, the fathers of our land, who laid the foundations of our laws and shaped the greatness of our country.”

Few cheered that. It was prophetic, but on that first day of the war the older generation’s thoughts about England’s youth were anxious thoughts. The Oxford Oath was still popular. Hitler was wicked; they knew that. He had forced this hated war on England. But fighting for the Union Jack, so powerful an incentive in 1914, had little appeal now. Vision was necessary, and in his closing remarks Churchill recognized that. Over the past few days, he observed, Parliament had passed bills entrusting “to the executive our most dearly valued traditional liberties,” but they would be safe there; no British government would use them “for class or party interests”; it would instead “cherish and guard them.” England’s dream was of a world in which all governments could be so trusted, the dignity of all people respected.

There was no standing ovation; whips on both sides of the House, wary of Churchill’s rhetoric, had seen to that. But after Lloyd George had delivered the day’s final speech, MPs of all parties surged toward Winston, their hands extended congratulating him. Comparison with the prime minister’s remarks was inevitable. In his diary Amery described Chamberlain’s address as “good, but not the speech of a war leader.” He added: “I think I see Winston emerging as PM out of it all by the end of the year.”
²²¹

If the prime minister overheard such invidious comparisons, he gave no sign of it. Cordially welcoming Churchill, he told him he had considered his letters and then told him the cabinet was being reshuffled. The Liberals had declined to join the government, and until now he had seen no role in the War Cabinet for the three service ministers. They had urged him to change his mind, however, and he had relented, which brought the average age of cabinet members—a matter which had troubled Winston—below sixty. Hore-Belisha would continue at the War Office, and Kingsley Wood would remain as secretary for air. However, Chamberlain proposed to transfer the Earl of Stanhope, now first lord of the Admiralty, to another post, and give the Admiralty to Churchill.

T
hus, at a stroke, Winston was given a place in the War Cabinet and the responsibility of a ministry—the one he cherished most. He was “very glad of this,” he wrote, “because, though I had not raised the point, I naturally preferred a definite task to that exalted brooding over the work done by others which may well be the lot of a Minister, however influential, who has no department.” Had Chamberlain given him a choice between the War Cabinet and the Admiralty on Friday, he wrote, “I should, of course, have chosen the Admiralty. Now I was to have both.” Clementine was waiting in the car outside No. 10, and Winston told her: “It’s the Admiralty. That’s a lot better than I thought.”
²²²

He would have preferred hurrying straight to his new post, because “the opening hours of war may be vital with navies,” but the first meeting of the War Cabinet was scheduled for 5:00
P.M.
It would be largely a formality; nevertheless, he had to be there. Thus he sent word to the Admiralty Board—“I shall take charge forthwith and arrive at six o’clock”—and headed for Downing Street. Newspaper opinion, led by
The Times
, had favored direction of the war by a small group, not more than five or six members. But counting the home secretary (Sir John Anderson) and the new Dominions secretary (Eden), Chamberlain’s War Cabinet had eleven, the other nine being himself, Halifax, Hoare (privy seal), Simon (Exchequer), Hore-Belisha (war), Kingsley Wood (air), Hankey (without portfolio), Churchill, and Lord Chatfield (coordination of defense). Of these, Chamberlain, Halifax, Hoare, and Simon were still the Big Four; they had been in the public eye so long that if England’s fortunes failed her, the British public would hold them accountable, even though the leaders had stayed in front by following public opinion. Every newspaper reader was familiar with them—Good Old Neville, as the crowds called him at his peak, the archetypical British businessman; Halifax, master of foxhounds, with the patrician’s gift for backing into the limelight; dapper, fussy Hoare, the cabinet’s fixer of Fleet Street opinion; Simon, the pedantic lawyer, of whom it was said that at the Exchequer he was chiefly concerned with making certain that Britain had enough money to pay the indemnity after losing the war.
²²³

If, as Chamberlain put it a week later, righteousness was “a tremendous force on our side,” no one else felt it. The British were depressed.
The Times
cheerfully reported that an eighty-six-year-old shepherd had presented the prime minister with a walking stick in the form of a rolled-up umbrella, whittled out of elm wood with a pocketknife; but shepherds were unthreatened by massive Luftwaffe bombings which, according to a Committee of Imperial Defence estimate, would last sixty days, leaving 600,000 dead and 1.2 million wounded. The committee had issued a statement, for reasons which defy understanding, that every possible precaution had been made: hospital beds had been prepared for the injured, thousands of papier-mâché coffins were stacked and then photographed for the press, and over a million burial forms were in the mail. The British public—remembering Baldwin’s warning that “the bomber will always get through”—already lacked a once-more-into-the-breach spirit, and this did not develop it.

Winston’s critics had predicted that if given a cabinet role he would be divisive, and now they observed with schadenfreude that he already was. The War Cabinet’s first duty was to choose a new chief of the Imperial General Staff, since Secretary for War Hore-Belisha wanted to replace Gort. The War Office preferred Ironside, and so did Hore-Belisha. But Tiny had remained aloof from political maneuvering; other generals had courted ministers who now nominated them. Churchill intervened vigorously, and as Hore-Belisha wrote in his diary that evening, “There was some opposition to Ironside’s appointment, but Winston came down on my side and strongly supported it; and that settled it.” Churchill also asked for a survey of British gun production, and during the discussion Major General H. L. Ismay, secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, entered the room with an air reconnaissance report: a German
Flotte
—four or five battleships, four cruisers, and five destroyers—had weighed anchor and put out to sea. As first lord, Churchill was particularly alert to any threat, by submarines or surface ships, to merchant vessels, England’s lifeline. If that was the
Flotte
’s mission, he said, they would be headed for the Baltic. Kingsley Wood, the air minister, agreed that the RAF could not ask for a “fairer target.” An air attack was authorized, by twenty-seven Blenheim bombers and nine Wellingtons. But here, as in so many other ventures early in the war, nothing went right for the British. Sir Ian Jacob, then a field-grade officer seconded to No. 10, recalls that the RAF mission, which failed, “showed how ineffective and ill-designed our aircraft and bombs were against strong defences and well-armoured ships.” Their mission unaccomplished, the British planes were downed by flak.
²²⁴

The meeting over, Churchill headed for the Admiralty—which had already signaled the fleet: “Winston is back”—crossing the Horse Guards Parade with a young friend. Winston observed that to improve British morale, the public’s conception of the country’s military establishment must be revised upward. Between 1914 and 1918 London’s chauvinistic press had elevated general and flag officers to the level of deities, and when the truth about the butchery in France and Flanders had eventually emerged, the crash in their status had been deafening. World War II restored dignity to the military profession, but it was not retroactive; it is still generally believed that during the interwar years English officers were insensitive, unimaginative Colonel Blimps. They weren’t. Churchill had found them to be keen, anxious observers of the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht buildups, and among them were the officers who, by coming to him, had risked their careers to prepare England for the ordeal they—but few civilians—knew was coming.

One of their projects, undertaken by those who anticipated the bombing of London, had been construction of a shelter for the country’s leaders at Storey’s Gate, two blocks south of Downing Street. Commonly described by the few who knew of it as the CWR, short for Cabinet War Room, it was actually an underground warren of drab rooms, including a bedroom for the P.M., whose sparse furnishings included a desk and a BBC microphone through which the P.M. could address the nation. Construction of this shelter—which might more properly be called a bunker, for its purpose, like that of the
Führerbunker
in Berlin, was to safeguard the leader’s life—had begun in 1935, after the War Office pointed out that No. 10 was far too fragile to survive heavy bombardments undamaged. Millions of Londoners, allies, and an unknown number of enemy spies, passed the CWR daily without knowing it. The drab stone building above it, facing St. James’s Park, bore a dull plaque reading
CENTRAL STATISTICAL OFFICE
.