The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (283 page)

On the western front of the Third Reich lay the greatest army Germany had ever mobilized to lunge into Belgium, Holland, and France: 136 divisions, ten of them panzer divisions, with virtually every aircraft in the Luftwaffe ready to darken the sky as the tanks and the infantry advanced. On May 1 the Führer, with his penchant for weekend invasions, set Sunday, May 5, as the day for
Fall Gelb
—Case Yellow—the assault on the Low Countries and France.

In Berlin, Shirer, listening to a 6:00
P.M.
BBC news broadcast on May 2, heard “the bad news” that “Chamberlain had just announced in the Commons the awful [Scandinavian] reverse.” Two days later he wrote in anguish: “The British have pulled pell-mell out of Namsos to the north of Trondheim, thus completing the debacle of Allied aid to the Norwegians in central Norway. Where was the British navy which Churchill only a few fortnights ago boasted would drive the Germans out of Norwegian waters?” And on May 4 Nicolson wrote that “there is grave suspicion of the Prime Minister. His speech about the Norwegian expedition has created disquiet. The House knows very well that it was a major defeat. But the P.M. said that ‘the balance of advantage rested with us’ and that ‘Germany has not attained her objective.’… If Chamberlain believed it himself, then he was stupid. If he did not believe it, then he was trying to deceive. In either case he loses confidence.”
¹⁹²

On May 3, a Friday, the day the men of Mauriceforce swung down an English gangplank, carrying the equipment they had never had a chance to use, Colonel Hans Oster of OKW intelligence (Abwehr) dined in the secluded Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf, at the home of one of his closest friends, Colonel G. J. Sas, military attaché in Holland’s Zitadelle embassy and an ardent anti-Nazi. Oster had provided his host with earlier Nazi plans to overrun The Hague, and ten days before Germany’s seizure of Denmark and Norway had given him OKW’s plans and the exact date for
Weserübung
. Now Sas listened intently as the Abwehr colonel told him that fifty Wehrmacht divisions were concentrated on the Reich’s western borders and the long-expected German offensive there would begin in a week—May 10. Actually, the offensive had been scheduled to begin in two days, but on that Friday the Führer set
der Tag
back to May 6, partly because of bad weather but also because the Foreign Ministry advised him that his pretext for invading the neutral Low Countries wasn’t good enough. The Dutch attaché sent Oster’s information home in the next day’s pouch. It reached The Hague within an hour of another coded warning from Holland’s envoy at the Vatican. The Dutch immediately passed this warning along to the Belgians, but not to the British or the French. Even at this late hour the Low Countries believed neutrality was possible.

How much of this information was in Churchill’s hands is unknown, but over a month earlier he had warned Britain: “More than a million German soldiers, including all their active divisions and armored divisions, are drawn up ready to attack, at a few hours’ notice, along the frontiers of Luxembourg, of Belgium, and of Holland. At any moment these neutral countries may be subjected to an avalanche of steel and fire.” Ten days later he had written Admiral Forbes: “It seems to me very likely that the great land battle in the West will soon begin.”
¹⁹³

On the French side of the Franco-Belgian border a brief argument enlivened the Sedan sector. General Charles Huntziger, responsible for it, was so convinced that the enemy would not strike there that he ordered the demolition of antitank obstacles which had been erected on the initiative of a major. Pierre Taittinger and another deputy, both members of the Chamber of Deputies’ Army Committee, inspected the position and were shocked at its vulnerability to enemy attack. In their report they wrote that the high command gave “
une importance exagérée
” to “the natural obstacles of the Ardennes forest and the Meuse river.” They “trembled” they wrote, at the thought of what a German attack could do to this strategic position and recommended urgent measures to strengthen it. Huntziger replied: “I believe that there are no urgent measures to take for the reinforcement of the Sedan sector.”
¹⁹⁴

On May 4 Hitler postponed
Fall Gelb
to May 7 and Premier Reynaud took the first steps toward dismissing General Gamelin from all his commands. Gamelin, though supreme commander of all Allied troops, had been completely ineffectual in the Norwegian campaign. Asked by the British how many troops he could send for the assault on Trondheim, he had replied, “One division per month.” Reynaud exploded. He said: “It would be a crime to leave this gutless man [
cet homme sans nerfs
] as head of the French army.”
¹⁹⁵

In parliamentary crises—one of which was shaping up in Westminster, though the prime minister didn’t seem to realize it—precedents are worthless. A real political donnybrook bears less resemblance to
Robert’s Rules of Order
than to a typhoon, in which water piles up behind a ship’s keel, baffling the screws and forcing the helmsman to violate every principle of seamanship to avoid broaching to. Winston had never been a shrewd manipulator of votes. If he ever held a serious conversation with David Margesson, the chief Tory whip, one wonders what they could have discussed. At 11:00
P.M.
on Saturday, April 27, he sent for Bill Deakin. Over the last several months he had done this often. Conscious of his contract with Cassell & Company and his obligation to finish his
History of the English-speaking Peoples
if possible, he had, according to Deakin, asked him “to spend an hour or so in the afternoon or in the early morning hours completing his chapters on the Norman Conquest and mediaeval England.”
¹⁹⁶

This, surely, was unique in the history of statesmanship. That Saturday evening the Admiralty was sending ships to rescue the survivors of the ill-starred Trondheim expedition—“ramshackle” was Winston’s word for it—while reinforcing the British force besieging Narvik. His Majesty’s cruiser
Glasgow
was headed for Molde to evacuate King Haakon, his government, and Norway’s gold reserves. The U-boats had sunk 101 merchant ships, and new corvette escort vessels intended to cut the German score—Winston’s “cheap and nasties,” nasty if not cheap—were doing the job, though the first lord was pondering, and would soon approve, closing the Mediterranean to normal British shipping. In the private office, Deakin recalls,

Churchill knew the government was in trouble and might fall. His wisest course would have been to play the lonely role which had been his lot for so long, behaving correctly but keeping his distance from a prime minister who might be on his way out. He couldn’t do it. Even when those in trouble were adversaries—for example, Hoare when his deal with Laval was exposed—Winston consoled them and, if it was in his power, helped them. He sensed that Chamberlain was in trouble. Plainly, the prime minister was overworked. When Chatfield resigned as minister for the coordination of defense his office was abolished; Churchill, at the prime minister’s request, took up part of the burden, and since early April had presided over the War Cabinet’s Military Coordination Committee. A
Daily Mail
headline on April 4 read: “
MR CHURCHILL BECOMES SUPER WAR CHIEF
,” and a columnist wrote that Winston had become “in effect, Britain’s Supreme Defence Minister.” Berlin radio broadcast on April 3 that Winston had been “elevated from warmonger to grand warmonger.” One of Churchill’s oldest friends wrote him: “You have indeed great responsibility now, you are practically at the top of the tree.” However, he went on: “What a terrible job you have Winston. Your helpmates do not strike me as being very good.” Another friend, suspicious, wrote that he couldn’t help “wondering whether it isn’t deliberately calculated… so as to load you with work as to make things impossible.”
¹⁹⁸

Separate forces were rallying round the prime minister and round his first lord, and there was very little either could do short of renouncing the premiership, which would have been absurd, since each felt himself the better man. One side whispered,
Gallipoli
; the other,
Munich
. On May 1 Harold Nicolson noted: “The Tapers and Tadpoles”—Taper and Tadpole were party hacks in Disraeli’s novel
Coningsby
—“are putting it around that the whole Norwegian episode is due to Winston. There is a theory going round that Lloyd George may head a Coalition Cabinet. What worries people is that everybody asks, ‘But whom could you put in Chamberlain’s place?’ ” Clearly it would require someone who would take a sacred oath never to say that Hitler had “missed the bus.” That slight remark rankled all England. Clementine called it “a monument to ignorance and obstinacy,” and the rage it sparked seems to us now to be all out of proportion to the offense. The P.M. was simply a victim of very poor timing, over which he had no control.
¹⁹⁹

But the anger was there; a Gallup poll early in May, after the defeat in Norway, shocked No. 10. Chamberlain’s supporters were vanishing. Only 32 percent of those polled backed him; 58 percent were vehement in their opposition. Nicolson went “to Arlington Street for the Watching Committee” and found “a glum crowd,” he wrote on April 30. “The general impression is that we may lose the war. The tanks position is appalling and we hear facts about that. We part in gloom. Black Week in the Boer War can hardly have been more depressing.”
²⁰⁰

Henry Channon, a Tory MP loyal to Chamberlain, noted in the April 30 entry in his diary that he had heard “more talk of a cabal against poor Neville.” Then, turning caustic: “ ‘They’ are saying that it is 1915 all over again, that Winston should be Prime Minister as he has more vigour and the country behind him.” On May 3 Ironside wrote in his diary: “I hear there is a first-class row commencing in the House, and that there is a strong movement to get rid of the PM.” He added a backhanded endorsement of Churchill: “Naturally the only man who can succeed is Winston and he is too unstable, though he has the genius to bring the war to an end.” This much was certain: Churchill’s steadfast stand against Hitler was all that kept his candidacy alive—in Clementine’s words, “Had it not been for your years of exile & repeated warnings re. the German peril, Norway might well have ruined you.” Typically, a Liberal peer wrote him May 2: “You, I believe, are the only person in the Cabinet who is not responsible for this War. You are not tarred with the Munich brush. Your advice to re-arm went unheeded. You did not let down the small nations or throw our friends to the wolves.”
²⁰¹

Later Winston wrote: “Failure at Trondheim! Stalemate at Narvik! Such in the first week of May were the only results we could show to the British nation, to our Allies, and to the neutral world, friendly or hostile. Considering the prominent part I played in these events… it was a marvel that I survived.” Like Clemmie and others, he attributed his durability to “the fact that for six or seven years I had predicted with truth the course of events, and had given ceaseless warnings, then unheeded but now remembered.”
²⁰²

Churchill was trying desperately to salvage something from the wretched campaign in Norway, to depart with dignity and a small victory—something to justify the casualties, the anxieties, the expenses, and the hopes of England. He could not mourn Trondheim. He had been against it from the start. All he had ever wanted was Narvik. But although Winston was farsighted, his vision did not extend into the Arctic Circle, where Admiral of the Fleet Lord Cork and Orrery was trying to reconcile his own aggressive instincts, Churchill’s prods, the lethargic general commanding the Tommies, and the fact that some of the general’s reasons for his immobility were quite sound. Major General Pierse Joseph Mackesy had drawn up a battle plan which he considered flawless. He would wait until the snow melted and then attack. According to his calculations, that would happen sometime in the summer. Cork didn’t believe that at this latitude the earth was ever entirely free of snow, though certainly it was too deep now. And it was growing deeper; more snow fell almost every day. It was “exasperating,” he wrote Winston, “not being able to get on, & I quite understand your wondering why we do not, but I assure you that it is not from want of desire to do so.”
²⁰³

Taking Narvik became a matter of face, though after the major German offensive erupted across the Channel on May 10, no one in His Majesty’s Government seriously considered trying to hold the town. On May 24 the cabinet voted to abandon it as soon as it was in Allied hands. That happened four days later, when it fell to British, French, and Polish troops. On Tuesday, June 4, the evacuation began; by Saturday the last Allied soldier had left. England scarcely noticed. Interest in Norway had dropped sharply; attention was riveted upon the Low Countries and northern France. In 1914, Churchill had written, the cabinet had been preoccupied by the Irish question when “a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.” Now that light had reappeared.
²⁰⁴

In Berlin it was impossible to forget that one was in the capital of a nation at war. Bands blared “
Heil Hitler Dir
,” headlines preached rage, enormous banners displaying the hakenkreuz streamed down tall buildings from roofs to the street, and posters demanded “
Deutschland Erwache!
”, “
Die Fahne Hoch!
”, and “
Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz!
” (“The Common Interest before Self-interest!”). On Saturday, May 4—the day Hitler again postponed
Fall Gelb
—Shirer noted in his diary: “The German papers are full of accusations that
Britain
now intends to ‘spread the war’ in the Mediterranean or Balkans or
somewhere else
, by which I take it they mean Holland.” May 5 was a Sunday, “and as the week began to unfold,” Shirer later recalled, “it became pretty clear to all of us in Berlin that the blow in the West would fall within a few days.”
²⁰⁵