The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (305 page)

Nothing—not his moods, not Britain’s defeats, not the slow strangulation of the U-boat blockade, not his reluctant generals—impeded Churchill’s capacity to inspire his countrymen and to fight for their salvation. Nothing diminished his love for his family. Nothing undercut his love of life. If one accepts Freud’s dictum that mental health is the ability to love and work, Churchill possessed his full mental health.

If anything, Churchill had attained what the American humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow called “self-actualization,” the condition at the top of Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” where is found creativity, morality, spontaneity, and the ability to parse problems, accept facts, and refute prejudices.

Churchill was never modest, yet he bridled at the suggestion that he had transformed Britons. He believed the British race had “the lion heart”; he only supplied the roar. He believed they had always been heroic. Afterward, much as in his response to Pug Ismay, he said: “It fell to me to express the
sentiments and resolves of the British nation in that supreme crisis of its life. That to me was an honor far beyond any dreams or ambitions I have ever nursed, and it was one that cannot be taken away.” At the time, however, he said, “It is destiny. Destiny has put me here, now, for this purpose.” Yet, “destiny” for Churchill meant only that he had arrived at this place and time; destiny did not guarantee the success of his mission. Only his actions, freely taken, could do that. He acknowledged the possibility that human affairs may be watched over and guided, as part of “the Almighty’s Great Design into which all our human actions fit if we do our duty.” His abiding agnosticism precluded certainty in the matter of divine influence, but not in the matter of doing his duty. Destiny, like fate, is all things to all men. Here it may be seen as that dynamic force within Churchill that, in combination with his will, altered history during the summer of 1940. Europe lay under Hitler’s boot, from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from beyond the Vistula to the English Channel, across which three weeks earlier the British army had fled, leaving French beaches strewn with abandoned tanks, trucks, cannons, rifles, rations, and the bodies of those Tommies who had not made it out. The Führer’s victorious generals now paced the French shore and gazed toward England’s white-chalk cliffs, just visible across the narrow waters of the Dover Strait.
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It would be a mistake to imagine Hitler in 1940 as a deranged Charlie Chaplinesque buffoon given to spewing spittle on the uniforms of dumbfounded Prussian subordinates during purple-faced tirades. The Führer was quite in command of his faculties that spring, at the top of his game. He had served five years with honor in the trenches during the Great War and been awarded the Iron Cross for bravery. He had been wounded three times—twice by shrapnel and once by gas, which temporarily blinded him. He had fought in twelve battles. Hitler anointed himself, the military historian Sir John Keegan wrote, “first soldier of the Reich,” yet he had earned that title by virtue of his courage during the Great War. His regiment—the 16th Bavarian Reserve—had suffered more than 100 percent casualties (military statisticians compute casualties based on the ratio of the original number of men in any unit to the number of replacements). Hitler in 1940 knew the inhuman hardships of war better than many of his generals, yet he also found the Great War to be “the greatest of all experiences.” Only the final result had proved unsatisfactory, a defeat inflicted as much by Germany’s national loss of will as by the Entente armies. Germany, then, had not deserved victory. This time would be different. This time already was different. Hitler was winning.
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Adolf Hitler was now the greatest conqueror in German history, his destiny fulfilled, by the exercise of
his
will. The war, such as it was, was just about over. The British must surely sue for peace, and Hitler was prepared
to offer generous terms, for he respected the English race. “He liked the Englanders,” recalled one of his SS bodyguards years later, adding, “except for Churchill.” The Führer’s Reich now basked in a splendorous Alpine dawn born of barbarity, deceit, and sheer Teutonic will. Britain stood alone in twilight, awaiting the seemingly inevitable descent of darkness. Were Churchill to prove himself a dangerous fool by rejecting Hitler’s peace terms, one final task would remain before the former corporal, the failed artist—the “housepainter” as Churchill called Hitler—could assume his place as master of his new European order: the severing of the British Empire’s head from its body.
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This was the status of Churchill, of London, of Britain and the British Empire, on the longest day of that year.

Hitler and his generals knew that they could crush the remnants of Britain’s army in a matter of days if they could only reach them, there, across the narrows and beyond the cliffs. But the cold Channel waters lapping at the conquerors’ boots only underscored an ancient and elemental truth; they were land warriors. Unlike English general officers, they were not “salt water generals.” They had no plans in place to cross the sea, did not understand the sea, and in fact, they and Hitler feared it. Churchill did not. The Channel was his moat, England his bailey; he intended to fight from his battlements until he could muster the men and arms necessary to strike out, across the Channel and into Europe, and finally someday, however long it took, across the Rhine and into Germany, to Berlin, where he would achieve his stated objective: final and absolute victory over Hitlerism. Were Hitler or destiny to deny him that, he told his cabinet, he fully expected each of them, himself included, to die “choking on his own blood upon the ground.”
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Churchill’s nemesis, Adolf Hitler, was a wicked political genius who rose to power by finding, and then occupying, the dark places in the German mind. The Führer’s gifts were not confined to his Reich, however. Although he spoke no foreign tongues and had never been overseas, he possessed an intuitive gift for exploiting weaknesses in what Germans call
das Ausland,
that revealing Teutonic word that welds together all nations outside the Reich into a single collective noun. Again and again in the 1930s, he had dared the allied governments of Britain and France to stand up to his acts
of aggression. Aghast at the prospect of another European war, they had turned away again and again, sacrificing their pride, their honor; even their prospects of national survival. In the meantime, his armed strength multiplied. Finally, at the end of the decade, after six years of preparation, he was ready. At dawn on Friday, September 1, 1939, he sent fifty-six Wehrmacht divisions roaring eastward into Poland. Now London and Paris had no choice. They were bound to Warsaw by military alliances. They had to declare war, and, reluctantly, they did.

In the Berlin suburb of Zossen, headquarters of the Führer’s
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
(Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, OKW), his field commanders were, in their turn, aghast. By turning to the east, ignoring the armies of England and France, he had defied OKW’s basic strategic principle, and invited a two-front war. Worse, he had stripped the defenses on the Reich’s Western Front, leaving a thin force of twenty-three second-rate divisions to face eighty-five heavily armed enemy divisions. It was a historic opportunity for Généralissime Gustav-Maurice Gamelin of France, who commanded the Allied troops. The German Supreme Command chief,
Generalfeldmarschall
Wilhelm Keitel, later testified that “a French attack would have encountered only a German military screen (
militärischen Schleier
), not a real defense.” To win the war, Gamelin had but to issue one command:
“En avant!”
His troops could have marched into the
Ruhrgebeit,
the heartland of German industry, and the war would have been over.

But he didn’t do it. Except for a token sortie in the direction of the Saar and its coal mines and steel furnaces—a meaningless gesture meant to encourage the Poles, yet one from which the Nazis fled—Allied troops remained where they were. Then, in five weeks of blitzkrieg, or lightning warfare, the Nazi juggernaut crushed Poland, freeing the Wehrmacht to turn westward. The moment had passed. French and British troops steeled themselves for the shock of a German offensive, but none came. They waited. And waited. By May of 1940 all had remained quiet on the Western Front for eight months. What fighting there was had been largely confined to the open seas, the realm of the Royal Navy, and the barren coast of Norway. On land, the great armies squatted idly opposite one another week after week in an unnatural silence.

Berliners called this extraordinary hush, unique in the history of modern warfare,
der Sitzkrieg.
In Paris it was
la drôle de guerre
(the amusing war), in London the Bore War. Churchill called it the Twilight War; America’s Senator William Borah, the Phony War. In England and France, the public, feeling emotionally ruptured after bracing themselves for the worst, returned instead to the pleasures of peace. But as the conflict entered its ninth sterile month, life was about to stir within in it. The greatest of all wars was about to erupt at last in a convulsion of violence, slaughter, and terror.

A
fterward everyone remembered the weather. The winter of 1939–1940 had been a white horror, Europe’s cruelest since 1895 (and, though neither Paris nor London knew it, the only reason Hitler hadn’t attacked), but spring was coming at last, and coming fast. Though March was its usual mottled mess, temperatures were exceptionally mild. Then, across the Continent, primroses were out, fruit trees were budding, crocuses teeming. As early as April 3, Sir Alexander Cadogan, a British diplomat with a green thumb, noted in his diary: “The herbaceous plants seem all alive-oh” and “Meadows are greening up nicely and copses purpling.”
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Within a fortnight the season had acquired a radiant, crystalline tone. So pure was the air that vision seemed enhanced, objects being perceived with a cameo-like clarity as sharp and well defined as a fine etching. Magnolias, snowdrops, and bright azaleas rioted in Kensington and Whitechapel alike. Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in
The New Yorker
that the floral displays in London parks “have been so magnificent that it’s a pity that the garden-loving Britons haven’t had more heart to go and see them,” adding that the season ahead “looks as though it were going to be the best, as far as weather and growing things go, that England has had in years.” Then she noted: “The tulips in the big beds outside Buckingham Palace are exactly the color of blood.”
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In the Low Countries across the Channel, cultivating garden tulips had been a major Dutch industry since the eighteenth century, selling the world triumph tulips, breeder’s tulips, and Darwin, parrot, cottage, and Mendel tulips. These were approaching their peak in late April and would soon be joined by graceful white tulips, always the loveliest. In tiny Luxembourg, the beauty of the gladioli was unprecedented. Belgium’s spring had always been announced by the tall, graceful plane and poplar trees elegantly lining Brussels’ wide gray streets, and now they, too, wore veils of pale green.

It was that rarity, a genuine idyll, a blessed time of crystal-clear air, of radiant mornings, of gentle twilights, and of soft, balmy evenings, when a delicate, bluish moisture fell on orchards and gardens. In late April, whipped-cream clouds hung motionless overhead; then the sky cleared. For six weeks not one drop of rain fell. Clothed in sunlight, their spirits soaring, people found pleasure in just lifting their faces to an immaculate heaven that seemed wider and higher and of a deeper blue than any before.

Alec Cadogan was rapturous: “It’s a lovely spring with sparkling air and wonderful blossoms and the whole world looking like paradise.” The same
enraptured theme ran through other diaries, journals, and letters. Anthony Eden noted the “unbroken sunshine.” At No. 10 Downing Street, Jock Colville rose early each morning to ride in Richmond Park, rejoicing in the “warm and summery weather.” General Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of His Majesty’s Imperial General Staff and thus England’s top soldier, wrote of “the most gorgeous weather,” and noted a week later that it was “still the most gorgeous weather.” In the rue de la Paix in Paris, the Duchess of Windsor, smartly dressed in a
Union des Femmes de France
uniform, supervised a soldiers’ canteen, and wrote her Aunt Bessie, “We have never had such a beautiful spring.” That spring was, the American war correspondent Vincent Sheean later wrote, “the loveliest Paris had ever known.” Then, remembering its climax, he added, “the weather itself formed part of the human drama.” In the Reich, some were reminded of August 1914, when German infantrymen in spiked helmets had written home of
Kaiserwetter.
Now their sons called it
Hitlerwetter.
General Heinz Guderian, the Nazi tank commander, was more specific. In his diary he called it
“völlig Panzerwetter.”
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Paris, always Europe’s most colorful city, had joined the dazzling spectacle with cannas, dahlias, daffodils, and freesias—seen at their best advantage in the gardens of the Tuileries—while along the Seine and the capital’s broad boulevards, the trees beloved by Parisians approached the height of their vernal flowering, their blossoms standing like small pink candles, and their dark green lapping leaves so delicately tarnished, in places so exquisite, that
Paris Soir
compared them to Renoir. Clare Boothe, touring Western Europe in that fourth month of 1940, wrote, “Now, in April, chestnuts burst into leaf on the lovely avenues of Paris, sunlight danced off the opalescent gray buildings, and the gold and gray sunsets, glimpsed through the soaring Arc de Triomphe at the end of the long splendid vista of the Champs-Élysées, brought a catch of pain and pleasure in your throat. Paris was Paris in April!”
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Paris was
gai—
a gaiety which, in retrospect, seems cruelly ironic. Immediately after the declaration of war, all theaters had closed, but now they reopened and were packed. So were the opera houses, cinemas, restaurants, and nightclubs; the stands at the Auteuil Hippodrome; the flower market at the Madeleine; the spring art exhibition at the Grand Palais; the
Concours d’Élégance
automobile race in the Bois de Boulogne sponsored by Renault and Citroën—even the Left Bank hall where the five academies gathered to hear Paul Valéry deliver his
Pensée de l’art française,
a lecture more widely covered by the Paris dailies that week than the war on all its fronts.

This year French fields had been plowed by troops. It was strange duty for soldiers in wartime, but thus far it had been a strange war; in isolated
skirmishes the French arms had suffered only two thousand casualties, a third of the Royal Navy’s losses in sea actions. Even so, the
Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre
(Supreme War Council) had bridled at the idea of soldiers manning plows and planting potatoes, arguing that such work was demeaning to their profession. However, the government, at the insistence of deputies with agricultural constituencies, pointed out that although career officers were professional soldiers, their troops were not; the men they commanded were peacetime civilians, many of them farmers, and if someone didn’t turn the earth and sow it, France would lose the war by starvation.

Some officers, among them Colonel Charles de Gaulle, were relieved when the generals were forced to back down. France’s army had a great reputation, even in Berlin, but idle troops are worrisome. The British Expeditionary Force, or BEF, had dealt with the problem of inactivity during the winter. Although there were still fewer than four hundred thousand British soldiers on the Continent—only 18 percent of the Allied ground forces—their quality was high, in part because officers kept spirits up with programs of vigorous exercise. The French did not. As the war entered its third season, the armies of France were stagnating, even rotting.

Every allowance must be made for the French, and the French soldier of 1940 must be regarded with great compassion. With the exception of Serbia, no nation had suffered so terribly in the Great War. Because their fathers had been bled white, the World War II generation, unlike that of 1914, simply wanted to be left alone.

At the time, this atrophy of spirit was imperfectly understood. In 1938, Churchill had called the French army “the most perfectly trained and faithful mobile force in Europe.” In January 1940, to his dismay, he found that the French did not view the war “with uprising spirit or even with much confidence.” He blamed the long months of waiting that had followed the collapse of Poland. This hiatus, he believed, had given “time and opportunity” for the “poisons” of communism and fascism to be established. It was certain, he wrote, that the quality of the French army was being “allowed to deteriorate during the winter.”
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The eight-month lull at the front was seen variously. Vincent Sheean wrote that there was “no possible doubt that a dawn must come, one day or the next, when the gray rivers of the German flood would begin to roll westward over Holland, Belgium and France… and yet, in the way people have, I think we only half believed the inevitable until it had taken place.”
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Since the expected curtain-raiser would have brought vast bloodshed, others were optimistic, including some who should have known better. General André Beaufre saw it as “a giant charade acted out by mutual consent”
that would lead to nothing serious “if we play our part right.” Alfred Duff Cooper, who had resigned from Chamberlain’s cabinet to protest the Munich sellout, fatuously told an American audience in Paris that the Allies had “found a new way to make war, without sacrificing human lives.”
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Many argued that it must stop, that it couldn’t go on this way, that there was no point to it. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain privately said he had “a hunch” that the war would be over by summer. Others felt otherwise; eminent men in Paris and London were persuaded that the war would continue as it was, with the naval blockade slowly strangling the Führer’s Reich. That would take a year or two, of course, but by then the British would have fifty divisions in the field, and doubtless the Americans would sail over with a hundred more to deliver the coup de grâce. (It was the sort of showy thing they liked to do.)

The arguments of the distinguished scholar Alfred Sauvy to the contrary, the French masses had accepted the war, however reluctantly. They believed France would win it. They felt “sure,” William L. Shirer, the CBS radio correspondent in Berlin, observed, “that all a democracy had to do to win a war was to declare it, that if a ‘free nation’ was united in its desire to win, no ‘slave-driven force’ like Hitler’s could defeat it… they talked to you about the gigantic War Effort, and explained to you how, because this was a democracy, the War Effort was certainly greater than in Germany, because it was voluntary.” Shirer noted a growing conviction that “in this peculiar war there was no need to suffer, to deprive oneself of the good, easy life. Sacrifice was not this time needed.”