The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (321 page)

Hearing of this, the P.M. sent the foreign office a blistering memo scoring the “lukewarmness” in Butler—Butler, whining, protested that he had been misunderstood—and restated the government’s determination “to fight to the death.”

Churchill told the King that “the intrusion of the ignominious King of Sweden as a peace-maker, after his desertion of Finland and Norway, and while he is absolutely in the German grip… is singularly distasteful.” His sovereign agreed. King George had caught the mood of his people; in his diary he wrote: “How can we talk of peace with Germany now after they have overrun and demoralized the peoples of so many countries in Europe? Until Germany is prepared to live peaceably with her neighbors in Europe, she will always be a menace. We have got to get rid of her aggressive spirit, her engines of war & the people who have been taught to use them.”
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Afterward, Englishmen as skeptical of politicians as Bernard Shaw and Malcolm Muggeridge agreed that had anyone but Churchill been prime minister in the summer of 1940, Britain would have negotiated an armistice with Hitler. In London the tenacious Swedish envoy informed Stockholm that several influential MPs had echoed Butler. Two of His Majesty’s ambassadors—Hoare in Madrid, and Lord Lothian in Washington—were seeking contacts with their Nazi counterparts, preparing for diplomatic “conversations.”

In Parliament the most prominent defeatist was Lloyd George, England’s prime minister in the Great War. Jealous of Churchill, once his colleague, the old Welshman had refused to join his cabinet. Instead he planned to replace him and approach the enemy, asking for terms. “I argue,” he told the House in his mellow, persuasive voice, “that the Government should take into consideration any proposals of peace which… review all the subjects that have been the cause of all the troubles of the last few years.” He made his position public. In the July 28
Sunday Pictorial,
he wrote, “I foresaw the catastrophe impending.” Had his advice been followed, he continued, it would have led to “a better understanding between the angry nations and to the rebuilding of the temper of peace…. I wish to point out that conditions were then more favourable for a discussion on equal terms than they are today, or probably will be a few weeks hence.”
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In Berlin Lloyd George was being seriously considered as a possible
leader of a puppet government. German psychologists told the Führer that Lloyd George reflected Britain’s mood. He didn’t; neither did Butler nor the Swedish ambassador’s informants; they were no longer in step with their countrymen. Every literate Londoner, it seemed, was reading
Guilty Men,
^*
a Labour attack written under the pseudonym Cato on the appeasers that indicted fifteen Tories, among them Baldwin, Chamberlain, Halifax, and Hoare, for neglecting England’s defenses. It seemed that Englishmen everywhere were scorning any suggestion of negotiations; in the old British army phrase, they were “bloody-minded.” Even Tom Jones, a former deputy secretary to the cabinet, wrote from Cliveden, “Everyone is willing to be conscripted for any duty and the main regret is that we cannot all be used.”
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Not only had the collapse of the French failed to discourage them; it had actually raised their morale.

Churchill’s defiant spirit had set the whole kingdom afire. Dunkirk had been a defeat, yet Englishmen had decked it with the laurels of victory. They had always been braced by the thought that their backs were against the wall, that the odds against them were hopeless. Now they recalled the maxim: “England always loses every battle except the last one.” They were, they reminded one another, descendants of Englishmen who, Macaulay wrote, had “lit the bonfires from Eddystone to Berwick-bound, from Lynn to Milford Bay, warning of the Spanish Armada’s approach undismayed and had watched, unintimidated, the twinkling of Napoleon’s bonfires at Boulogne.”
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Dorothy L. Sayers wrote:

On their display boards, news vendors chalked: “We’re in the final—to be played on home ground.” Somerset Maugham, reaching Liverpool at last, found no discouragement over the French debacle, only men who said confidently, “It doesn’t matter; we can lick the Jerries alone” and “Fear of invasion? Not a shadow of it. We’ll smash ’em. It’ll take time, of course, but that’s all right; we can hang on.” “It was,” Maugham concluded, “a
very different England from the England I had left a few weeks earlier. It was more determined, more energetic and more angry. Winston Churchill had inspired the nation with his own stern and resolute fortitude.”
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In
The New Yorker,
Mollie Panter-Downes described the public temper as “grimly sane.” On June 22 she wrote: “The individual Englishman seems to be singularly unimpressed by the fact that there is now nothing between him and the undivided attention of a war machine such as the world has never seen before. Possibly it’s lack of imagination; possibly again it’s the same species of dogged resolution which occasionally produces an epic like Dunkirk.” By late summer she herself seemed to have been caught up in the emotional firestorm. “The ordinary individual is magnificent in a moment like this,” she wrote, and, two weeks later, “The calm behavior of the average individual continues to be amazing.” Like Maugham she finally concluded that the key to the nation’s soaring morale was the new prime minister. She quoted the
Times,
which had considered Churchill unsound for ten years, as continuing its suspicions—“Mr. Churchill is still, in some respects, a solitary figure”—and commented: “That solitary figure continues to command the devotion and confidence of all classes which has probably been equaled only by the great William Pitt in 1759, ‘the year of victories.’ England would seem to have found her man of destiny at a critical juncture, when her well-wishers were beginning to fear that destiny was taking the down, not the up, grade. An extraordinary leader and the determination of an extraordinary people have brought back hope and dignity to a scene that has long and humiliatingly lacked them.”
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D
uring the summer after France fell, Englishmen awaited, at any moment, the appearance, by sea and by parachute, of the German army. That was the German way. They appeared on the Polish frontier the previous year; they appeared off the coast of Norway that spring; they emerged from the Ardennes in May; they dropped from the sky into Rotterdam. Englishmen, therefore, believed themselves to be in deadly peril, and continued to do so with varying degrees of trepidation until the late summer of 1942, in large part because Churchill told them so. Churchill, in turn, believed the Germans
might
come, and demanded every necessary precaution be taken
should
the Germans come, but he did not believe—that summer or the next—that they
would
come. Soon after the French surrender, he told Colville: “Hitler must invade or fail. If he fails, he is bound to go East [to Russia], and fail he will.”
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That statement was not the most precise formulation of his beliefs, but it contained the essence: Hitler could try to invade England, and would fail, or Hitler would turn against his partner Joseph Stalin. To that end, Churchill wrote a letter to Stalin in late June in hopes of opening up communications with the Marshal of the sort he had established with Franklin Roosevelt. He entrusted the letter to his new ambassador to Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, a socialist whose very appointment as ambassador Churchill intended as a signal to Stalin.

The issue, as Churchill told Stalin (Churchill always pronounced his name
Schtaleen
), was whether Hitler’s “bid for hegemony of Europe threatens the interests of the Soviet Union.” It certainly threatened England’s. Churchill acknowledged that relations between London and Moscow had “been hampered by mutual suspicions” (a marvelous understatement), but said that now only they could contest Hitler’s quest for continental hegemony, by virtue of their geographical positions, which were “not in Europe but on her extremities.” The idea that Britain was part of Europe but not “in” Europe informed Churchill’s political beliefs for his entire life. He would have found nothing parochial or comical in the apocryphal London headline: F
OG IN
C
HANNEL
—C
ONTINENT
I
SOLATED
. Indeed, Hitler had now isolated the Continent. Great Britain’s two objectives, Churchill told Stalin, were to “save herself from Nazi domination” and “to free the rest of Europe” from Nazi domination. The message was meant to reassure Stalin. Stalin never replied. Cripps reported that Stalin, after reading the letter, denigrated the possibility of German territorial ambitions and asserted his belief that Germany posed no danger to Russia. After Cripps was dismissed, Stalin ordered his minister of foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, to pass the minutes of his conversation with Cripps on to Berlin, a gesture intended to remind Hitler of Stalin’s abiding friendship.
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Churchill had not read Hitler’s mind; Hitler had broadcast his intention to crush the Bolshevik Soviet Union in his autobiography,
Mein Kampf.
It was all there. He had written with absolute clarity: “This colossal empire [Russia] in the East is ripe for dissolution. And the end of the Jewish domination of Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.” Hitler, in turn, had no need to try to read Churchill’s mind; he was reading his mail. It is not surprising, therefore, that in mid-July, Hitler declared to his military chiefs that “Britain’s hope lies in Russia and America.” He was correct. He noted that Britain was “back on her feet,” sustained in part by their Russian hopes. Therefore, he declared, “if Russia is smashed, Britain’s last hope will be shattered…. Decision: In view of these considerations Russia must be liquidated. Spring, 1941.”
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Churchill arrived at his certainty regarding Germany and Russia through a balance of cold logic and intuition, although some of his colleagues would
say it was more of a collision. This was how he approached all problems. Whether parsing geopolitical matters such as continental hegemony, or the Mediterranean theater, or the finer points of the defense of England, Churchill came at every issue with a painter’s eye; the whole was larger than the sum of its parts. He saw the beauty and vitality of details, and their effect on larger strategic issues, and demanded that they be scrutinized all the time. The most obvious and simplest of facts portended larger strategic issues. One fact, often neglected in the telling of the tale of that summer, underlay Churchill’s planning for a German invasion: A day is divided into daylight hours and nighttime hours. The Battle of Britain is often described as “a battle for air supremacy.” In fact, it was a battle for
daytime
air supremacy. Everything changed after dark. Night bombers—British and German—flew without fear of fighters, and with little fear of anti-aircraft fire, but sacrificed targeting accuracy. Fighter planes went aloft at night only when the moon was full, or nearly full, to protect their bombers or search the skies for the enemy’s. Armies could maneuver and fight by night or day. But in late June, the German army was in France, while the British army—hobbled but rebuilding—was in England. Churchill of course could not know that the Germans had not yet even contemplated an invasion. But he did know that if the Germans attempted one, they could arrive on English soil in meaningful numbers only by sea. Churchill believed they could not do so. In order to land at dawn, an invasion armada would have to sail at night, but with German fighter planes grounded during darkness, the Royal Navy—its largest ships equipped with radar—owned the night. At night, the Royal Navy could hunt the enemy’s invasion barges and ships at will. In a July 7 memo to Ironside, Churchill wrote: “Except in very narrow waters, it would be most hazardous and even suicidal to commit a large army to the accidents of the sea in the teeth of our very numerous armed patrolling forces.”
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Churchill warned the House that it would be impossible for the Royal Navy “to prevent raids by 5,000 or 10,000 men flung suddenly across and thrown ashore at several points on the coast some dark night or foggy morning.” But those raiders would soon find themselves surrounded by units of the British army. If such a force came ashore in northern England or Scotland, it would find itself hundreds of miles from London, and irrelevant. No, the Germans had to come in overwhelming force, and land within one hundred miles of London. Churchill believed that Hitler—if he came—would try to decapitate the British government in London, in order to force a settlement with a new, more malleable government. A military conquest and occupation of all of Britain, from Devon to the Midlands to Scotland, was simply beyond the means of the Wehrmacht, not
because the German army lacked the men and tanks, but because Germany lacked the shipping to even
try
to carry such a force to England.
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