The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (289 page)

That same Saturday, Margot Asquith, writing a letter to Geoffrey Dawson at
The Times
, told how, on impulse, she had taken a taxi to No.10 the previous evening; she had looked at Chamberlain’s “spare figure and keen eye and could not help comparing it with Winston’s self-indulgent rotundity.” R. A. Butler called Churchill “a half-breed American.” And that evening young Colville, at No. 10, wrote in his diary: “There seems to be some inclination in Whitehall to believe that Winston will be a complete failure and that Neville will return.” Long afterward Colville observed: “Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with the Establishment… so dubious of the choice and so prepared to have its doubts justified.” Only a month earlier Eden’s followers in Parliament had outnumbered Churchill’s and some of Winston’s closest friends preferred Lloyd George as an alternative to Chamberlain.
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Among the general public it was different. Even so, the
News Chronicle
had reported that according to an opinion poll, his principal support was among “those in the lower income groups, those between 21 and 30, and among men.” A prime minister should enjoy broader approval, particularly among the sophisticated, and a Conservative prime minister, in the House of Commons, ought to receive more cheers from Tory benches than from Labour. In his May 13 diary entry Nicolson noted: “When Chamberlain enters the House, he gets a terrific reception, and when Churchill comes in the applause is less. Winston sits there between Chamberlain and Attlee”—Attlee was now lord privy seal and, in effect, deputy prime minister—“[and then] makes a very short statement, but to the point.” The only tribute to the new prime minister came from Lloyd George, who spoke of his “glittering intellectual gifts, his dauntless courage, his profound study of war, and his experience in its operation and direction.” Winston wept.
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What Nicolson called Churchill’s “very short statement” and Geoffrey Dawson described patronizingly as “quite a good little warlike speech from Winston” included five words now known to millions who were unborn at the time, who have never seen England, and do not even speak English.

The mighty Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, with its garrison of 1,200, fell on Saturday, May 11, the second day of the great Nazi offensive, captured by only 78 parachute-engineers led by a lieutenant. Landing in gliders on the unguarded roof, they blew up the armored cupolas and casemates of the fort’s guns with a new, highly intensive explosive kept secret until now. Belgian frontier guards were prepared to blow up the bridges of the King Albert Canal, blocking the Nazi advance, but another small Nazi detachment, dropping silently out of the night sky, massacred them. In Holland the French Seventh Army engaged the Germans and was flung back. Liège fell to blond young Nazis shouting “
Heil Hitler!
” as they threw their bodies on the muzzles of Belgian machine guns, sacrificing themselves to maintain the blitzkrieg’s momentum. On Tuesday, Rotterdam was the target of a massive Luftwaffe terror attack; thousands of 2,200-pound delayed-action bombs gutted the center of the city, destroyed 25,000 houses, and left 78,000 civilians homeless and a thousand dead. Rotterdam capitulated. The Dutch commander in chief surrendered his entire army. Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government fled to London.

That was the small shock. The great shock came in barely coherent dispatches from the Meuse. Guderian, leading mechanized spearheads of Rundstedt’s army group, had been racing through Luxembourg and Belgium’s Luxembourg Province. After rocking and tilting and pivoting their way through a seven-mile stretch of the Ardennes—they had been elaborately rehearsed in the Black Forest—these forces had entered France Sunday, right on schedule. Before Churchill had completed the formation of his cabinet, the Germans had seven tank divisions on the Meuse near Sedan. The heights on the far side of the Meuse were forbidding. The French had rushed heavy artillery there, and after firing a few rounds at the panzers, the artillery officer predicted that the Nazis would try to cross elsewhere. But the Germans had rehearsed this, too, and Rundstedt was a master at integrating his commands, including the use of tactical air. At first light on Monday, Stukas and low-level bombers began pounding the French batteries; by 4:00
P.M.
every field piece, every enemy howitzer on the heights, had been destroyed. Nazi rubber boats reached the far shore unmolested; beachheads were established; pontoon bridges spanned the river, then heavy bridges—and finally, lumbering and growling, German tanks.

French tanks appeared to challenge them. They were superior to the Germans’ in design and armament, and history’s first great tank battle seemed imminent. But the outcome, to use a word that was on everyone’s lips that week, was
une débâcle
. The French tank commanders weren’t to blame. Their high command, having ruled that armor was to be used only in support of infantry, had gone to extraordinary lengths to discourage attacks by armored formations. The installation of radios in turrets had been forbidden. The French drivers, assembled from different units and unable to communicate with one another, could not coordinate a counterattack. In two hours Guderian’s panzers had blown up fifty of them. The rest fled. Among the frustrated Frenchmen was Colonel de Gaulle. To his astonishment, dismay, and
effroi
, he saw shuffling mobs of poilus without weapons. The Germans had no time to take prisoners; they had disarmed the men and left them to blunder about. Meantime, the panzers had made a second crossing of the Meuse at Dinant. German armor was now pouring across the river. In Vincennes, however, concerned French officials calling upon Généralissime Gamelin found him still confident. He did ask if they had any news of the fighting. Apparently all the dispatches sent to him had gone astray.

Guderian’s tanks had reached Montcornet, less than fifteen miles from Laon; they were plunging down the valley of the Somme toward Abbeville on the English Channel. Aghast, the Allied forces in Belgium, including the BEF, realized that the great German scythe slicing across France was slicing behind them. Already they were cut off from the main French armies in the south. On the nineteenth Reynaud dismissed Gamelin from all commands; his predecessor, seventy-three-year-old Maxime Weygand, was brought out of retirement to take over, but Weygand was helpless; events were beyond his control; the Nazis seemed to be everywhere, and everywhere victorious. Thus, only a few days after their advance into Belgium, the French and British divisions in the north disengaged and retreated behind the line of the Scheldt. Lord Gort was poring over a map, studying routes to the Channel ports, where the Germans planned to turn the last key in the last lock.

On May 19, Churchill addressed the nation over the BBC:

He had received, he said, “the most sacred pledges” from the leaders of the French Republic, “and in particular from its indomitable Prime Minister, M. Reynaud… that whatever happens they will fight to the end, be it bitter or glorious.” Then, a typical Churchill touch: “Nay, if we fight to the end, it can only be glorious.”

Since receiving the King’s commission, he told the country, he had formed a government “of men and women… of almost every point of view.

Despite the “most sacred pledges” from Paris, the possibility loomed that France might not fight “to the end.” The leaders of a nation verging on collapse cannot commit their countrymen if the army can no longer defend them. In capitals around the world leaders and newspapers wondered whether, if France fell, England would also quit. The prime minister again went on the air, on June 18, the day after Pétain sued for peace, to discount such speculation—to vow that England would continue the battle alone:

H
e had come to power because he had seen through Hitler from the very beginning—but not, ironically, because his inner light, the source of that insight, was understood by Englishmen. Churchill’s star was invisible to the public and even to most of his peers. But a few saw it. One of them wrote afterward that although Winston knew the world was complex and in constant flux, to him “the great things, races, and peoples, and morality were eternal.” Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher, later observed that the Churchill of 1940 was neither “a sensitive lens, which absorbs and concentrates and reflects… the sentiments of others,” nor a politician who played “on public opinion like an instrument.” Instead Berlin saw him as a leader who imposed his “imagination and his will upon his countrymen,” idealizing them “with such intensity that in the end they approached his ideal and began to see themselves as he saw them.” In doing so he “transformed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armour.”
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Churchill’s mood seemed to confirm this. He possessed an inner radiance that year and felt it. In his memoirs he wrote that “by the confidence, indulgence, and loyalty by which I was upborne, I was soon able to give an integral direction to almost every aspect of the war. This was really necessary because times were so very bad. The method was accepted because everyone realised how near were death and ruin. Not only individual death, which is the universal experience, stood near, but, incomparably more commanding, the life of Britain, her message, and her glory.”
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To him, Britain, “her message, and her glory,” were very real. At times he would address his country as though she were a personage. After he had comprehended the revolution wrought at Kitty Hawk he said (to the astonishment of his companion, who had thought they were alone), “You came into big things as an accident of naval power when you were an island. The world had confidence in you. You became the workshop of the world. You populated the island beyond its capacity. Through an accident of airpower you will probably cease to exist.” It sounded quaint, and it was. Churchill was not a public figure like, say, Roosevelt, who thought and spoke in the idiom of his own time. He was instead the last of England’s great Victorian statesmen, with views formed when the British lion’s roar could silence the world; he was the champion of the Old Queen’s realm and the defender and protector of the values Englishmen of her reign had cherished, the principles they held inviolate, the vision which had illumined their world, which had steadied them in time of travail, and which he had embraced as a youth.
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