Finest Years
MAX HASTINGS

Churchill as Warlord 1940-45

Copyright

William Collins

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Published by HarperPress in 2009

Copyright © Max Hastings 2009

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In memory of Roy Jenkins, and our Indian summer friendship

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

One: The Battle of France

Two: The Two Dunkirks

Three: Invasion Fever

Four: The Battle of Britain

Five: Greek Fire

Six: Comrades

Seven: The Battle of America

Eight: A Glimpse of Arcadia

Nine: ‘The Valley of Humiliation’

Ten: Soldiers, Bosses and ‘Slackers’

Eleven: ‘Second Front Now!’

Twelve: Camels and the Bear

Thirteen: The Turn of Fortune

Fourteen: Out of the Desert

Fifteen: Sunk in the Aegean

Sixteen: Tehran

Seventeen: Setting Europe Ablaze

Eighteen: Overlord

Nineteen: Bargaining with an Empty Wallet

Twenty: Athens: ‘Wounded in the House of Our Friends’

Twenty-One: Yalta

Twenty-Two: The Final Act

Keep Reading

Notes and Sources

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

It may well be that the most glorious chapters of our history have yet to be written. Indeed, the very problems and dangers that encompass us and our country ought to make English men and women of this generation glad to be here at such a time. We ought to rejoice at the responsibilities with which destiny has honoured us, and be proud that we are guardians of our country in an age when her life is at stake.

WSC, April 1933

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.

WSC, November 1940

INTRODUCTION

Winston Churchill was the greatest Englishman and one of the greatest human beings of the twentieth century, indeed of all time. Yet beyond that bald assertion there are infinite nuances in considering his conduct of Britain’s war between 1940 and 1945, which is the theme of this book. It originated nine years ago, when Roy Jenkins was writing his biography of Churchill. Roy flattered me by inviting my comments on the typescript, chapter by chapter. Some of my suggestions he accepted, many he sensibly ignored. When we reached the Second World War, his patience expired. Exasperated by the profusion of my strictures, he said: ‘You’re trying to get me to do something which you should write yourself, if you want to!’ By that time, his health was failing. He was impatient to finish his own book, which achieved triumphant success.

In the years that followed I thought much about Churchill and the war, mindful of some Boswellian lines about Samuel Johnson: ‘He had once conceived the thought of writing The Life Of Oliver Cromwell…He at length laid aside his scheme, on discovering that all that can be told of him is already in print; and that it is impracticable to procure any authentick information in addition to what the world is already possessed of.’ Among the vast Churchillian bibliography, I was especially apprehensive about venturing anywhere near the tracks of David Reynolds’s extraordinarily original and penetrating In Command of History (2004). The author dissected successive drafts of Churchill’s war memoirs, exposing contrasts between judgements on people and events which the old statesman initially proposed to make, and those which he finally deemed it prudent to publish. Andrew Roberts has painted a striking portrait of wartime Anglo-American relations, and especially of the great summit meetings, in Masters and Commanders (2008). We have been told more about Winston Churchill than any other human being. Tens of thousands of people of many nations have recorded even the most trifling encounters, noting every word they heard him utter. The most vivid wartime memory of one soldier of Britain’s Eighth Army derived from a day in 1942 when he found the prime minister his neighbour in a North African desert latrine. Churchill’s speeches and writings fill many volumes.

Yet much remains opaque, because he wished it thus. Always mindful of his role as a stellar performer upon the stage of history, he became supremely so after 10 May 1940. He kept no diary because, he observed, to do so would be to expose his follies and inconsistencies to posterity. Within months of his ascent to the premiership, however, he told his staff that he had already schemed the chapters of the book which he would write as soon as the war was over. The outcome was a ruthlessly partial six-volume work which is poor history, if sometimes peerless prose. We shall never know with complete confidence what he thought about many personalities—for instance Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Alanbrooke, King George VI, his cabinet colleagues—because he took good care not to tell us.

Churchill’s wartime relationship with the British people was much more complex than is often acknowledged. Few denied his claims upon the premiership. But between the end of the Battle of Britain in 1940 and the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942, not only many ordinary citizens, but also some of his closest colleagues, wanted operational control of the war machine to be removed from his hands, and some other figure appointed to his role as Minister of Defence. It is hard to overstate the embarrassment and even shame of British people as they perceived the Russians playing a heroic part in the struggle against Nazism, while their own army seemed incapable of winning a battle. To understand Britain’s wartime experience, it appears essential to recognise, as some narratives do not, the sense of humiliation which afflicted Britain amid the failures of its soldiers, contrasted—albeit often on the basis of wildly false information—with the achievement of Stalin’s.

Churchill was dismayed by the performance of the British Army, even after victories began to come at the end of 1942. Himself a hero, he expected others likewise to show themselves heroes. In 1940, the people of Britain, together with their navy and air force, wonderfully fulfilled his hopes. Thereafter, however, much of the story of Britain’s part in the war seems to me that of the prime minister seeking more from his own nation and its warriors than they could deliver. The failure of the army to match the prime minister’s aspirations is among the central themes of this book.

Much discussion of Britain’s military effort in World War II focuses upon Churchill’s relationship with his generals. In my view, this preoccupation is overdone. The difficulties of fighting the Germans and Japanese went much deeper than could be solved by changes of commander. The British were beaten again and again between 1940 and 1942, and continued to suffer battlefield difficulties thereafter, in consequence of failures of tactics, weapons, equipment and culture even more significant than lack of mass or inspired leadership. The gulf between Churchillian aspiration and reality extended to the peoples of occupied Europe, hence his faith in ‘setting Europe ablaze’ through the agency of Special Operations Executive, which had malign consequences that he failed to anticipate. SOE armed many occupied peoples to fight more energetically against each other in 1944-45 than they had done earlier against the Germans.

It is a common mistake, to suppose that those who bestrode the stage during momentous times were giants, set apart from the personalities of our own humdrum society. I have argued in earlier books that we should instead see 1939-45 as a period when men and women not much different from ourselves strove to grapple with stresses and responsibilities which stretched their powers to the limit. Churchill was one of a tiny number of actors who proved worthy of the role in which destiny cast him. Those who worked for the prime minister, indeed the British people at war, served as a supporting cast, seeking honourably but sometimes inadequately to play their own parts in the wake of a titan.

Sir Edward Bridges, then Cabinet Secretary, wrote of Churchill between 1940 and 1942: ‘Everything depended upon him and him alone. Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win.’ This remains the view of most of the world, almost seventy years later. Yet there is also no shortage of iconoclasts. In a recent biography Cambridge lecturer Nigel Knight writes contemptuously of Churchill: ‘He was not mad or simple; his misguided decisions were a product of his personality—a mixture of arrogance, emotion, self-indulgence, stubbornness and a blind faith in his own ability.’ Another modern biographer, Chris Wrigley, suggests that Sir Edward Bridges’ tribute to Churchill ‘may overstate his indispensability’.

Such strictures seem otiose to those of us convinced that, in his absence, Britain would have made terms with Hitler after Dunkirk. Thereafter, beyond his domestic achievement as war leader, he performed a diplomatic role of which only he was capable: as suitor of the United States on behalf of the British nation. To fulfil this, he was obliged to overcome intense prejudices on both sides of the Atlantic. So extravagant was Churchill’s—and Roosevelt’s—wartime rhetoric about the Anglo-American alliance, that even today the extent of mutual suspicion and indeed dislike between the two peoples is often underestimated. The British ruling class, in particular, condescended amazingly towards Americans.

In 1940-41, Winston Churchill perceived with a clarity which eluded some of his fellow countrymen that only American belligerence might open a path to victory. Pearl Harbor, and not the prime minister’s powers of seduction, eventually brought Roosevelt’s nation into the war. But no other statesman could have conducted British policy towards the United States with such consummate skill, nor have achieved such personal influence upon the American people. This persisted until 1944, when his standing in the US declined precipitously, to revive only when the onset of the Cold War caused many Americans to hail Churchill as a prophet. His greatness, which had come to seem too large for his own impoverished country, then became perceived as a shared Anglo-American treasure.

From June 1941 onwards, Churchill saw much more clearly than most British soldiers and politicians that Russia must be embraced as an ally. But it seems important to strip away legends about aid to the Soviet Union, and to acknowledge how small this was in the decisive 1941-42 period. Stalin’s nation saved itself with little help from the Western Allies. Only from 1943 onwards did supplies to Russia gain critical mass, and Anglo-American ground operations absorb a significant part of the Wehrmacht’s attention. The huge popularity of the Soviet Union in wartime Britain was a source of dismay, indeed exasperation, to the small number of people at the top who knew the truth about the barbarity of Stalin’s regime, its hostility to the West, and its imperialistic designs on Eastern Europe.

The divide between the sentiments of the public and those of the prime minister towards the Soviet Union became a chasm in May 1945. One of Churchill’s most astonishing acts, in the last weeks of his premiership, was to order the Joint Planning Staff to produce a draft for Operation Unthinkable. The resulting document considered the practicability of launching an Anglo-American offensive against the USSR, with forty-seven divisions reinforced by the remains of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, to restore the freedom of Poland. Though Churchill recognised this as a remote contingency, it is remarkable that he caused the chiefs of staff to address it at all.

I am surprised how few historians seem to notice that many things which the British and Americans believed they were concealing from the Soviets—for instance, Bletchley Park’s penetration of Axis ciphers and Anglo-American arguments about launching a Second Front—were well known to Stalin, through the good offices of communist sympathisers and traitors in Whitehall and Washington. The Soviets knew much more about their allies’ secret policy-making than did the British and Americans about that of the Russians.

It is fascinating to study public mood swings through wartime British, American and Russian newspapers, and the diaries of ordinary citizens. These often give a very different picture from that of historians, with their privileged knowledge of how the story ended. As for sentiment at the top, some men who were indifferent politicians or commanders contributed much more as contemporary chroniclers. The diaries of such figures as Hugh Dalton, Leo Amery and Lt.Gen. Henry Pownall make them more valuable to us as eye-witnesses and eavesdroppers than they seemed to their contemporaries as players in the drama.

Maj.Gen. John Kennedy, for much of the war the British Army’s Director of Military Operations, kept a diary which arguably ranks second only to that of Gen. Sir Alan Brooke for its insights into the British military high command. On 26 January 1941, in the darkest days of the conflict, Kennedy expressed a fear that selective use of accounts of the meetings of Britain’s leaders might mislead posterity:

It would be easy by a cunning or biased selection of evidence to give the impression for instance that the P.M.’s strategic policy was nearly always at fault, & that it was only by terrific efforts that he is kept on the right lines—and it would be easy to do likewise with all the chiefs of staff. The historian who has to deal with the voluminous records of this war will have a frightful task. I suppose no war has been so well documented. Yet the records do not often reveal individual views. It is essentially a government of committees…Winston is of course the dominating personality & he has in his entourage and among his immediate advisers no really strong personality. Yet Winston’s views do not often prevail if they are contrary to the general trend of opinion among the service staffs. Minutes flutter continually from Winston’s typewriter on every conceivable subject. His strategic imagination is inexhaustible and many of his ideas are wild and unsound and impractic-able…but in the end they are killed if they are not acceptable.

These observations, made in the heat of events, deserve respect from every historian of the period. Another banal and yet critical point is that circumstances and attitudes shifted. The prime minister often changed his mind, and deserves more credit than he sometimes receives for his willingness to do so. Meanwhile, others vacillated in their views of him. Some who revered Churchill in the first months of his premiership later became bitterly sceptical, and vice versa. After Dunkirk, Britain’s middle classes were considerably more staunch than some members of its traditional ruling caste, partly because they knew less about the full horror of the country’s predicament. History perceives as pivotal Britain’s survival through 1940, so that the weariness and cynicism that pervaded the country by 1942, amid continuing defeats, are often underrated. Industrial unrest, manifested in strikes especially in the coalfields, and in the aircraft and shipbuilding industries, revealed fissures in the fabric of national unity which are surprisingly seldom acknowledged.

This book does not seek to retell the full story of Churchill at war, but rather to present a portrait of his leadership from the day on which he became prime minister, 10 May 1940, set in the context of Britain’s national experience. It is weighted towards the first half of the conflict, partly because Churchill’s contribution was then much greater than it became later, and partly because I have sought to emphasise issues and events about which there seem new things to be said. There is relatively little in this book about the strategic air offensive. I addressed this earlier in Bomber Command and Armageddon. I have here confined myself to discussion of the prime minister’s personal role in key bombing decisions. I have not described land and naval campaigns in detail, but instead considered the institutional cultures which influenced the performance of the British Army, Royal Navy and RAF, and the three services’ relationships with the prime minister.

To maintain coherence, it is necessary to address some themes and episodes which are familiar, though specific aspects deserve reconsideration. There was, for instance, what I have called the second Dunkirk, no less miraculous than the first. Churchill’s biggest misjudgement of 1940 was his decision to send more troops to France in June after the rescue of the BEF from the beaches. Only the stubborn insistence of their commander, Lt.Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, made it possible to overcome the rash impulses of the prime minister and evacuate almost 200,000 men who would otherwise have been lost.

The narrative examines some subordinate issues and events in which the prime minister’s role was crucial, such as the strategic contribution of SOE—as distinct from romantic tales of its agents’ derring-do—the Dodecanese campaign and Churchill’s Athens adventure in December 1944. I have attempted little original research in his own papers. Instead, I have explored the impression he made upon others—generals, soldiers, citizens, Americans and Russians. Moscow’s closure of key archives to foreign researchers has curtailed the wonderful bonanza of the post-Cold War period. But much important material was published in Russian documentary collections.

It seems mistaken to stint on quotation from Alan Brooke, John Colville and Charles Wilson (Lord Moran), merely because their records have been long in the public domain. Recent research on Moran’s manuscript suggests that, rather than being a true contemporary record, much of it was written up afterwards. Yet most of his anecdotes and observations appear credible. The diaries of Churchill’s military chief, junior private secretary and doctor provide, for all their various limitations, the most intimate testimony we shall ever have about Churchill’s wartime existence.

He himself, of course, bestrides the tale in all his joyous splendour. Even at the blackest periods, when his spirits sagged, flashes of exuberance broke through, which cheered his colleagues and contemporaries, but caused some people to recoil from him. They were dismayed, even disgusted, that he so conspicuously thrilled to his own part in the greatest conflict in human history. ‘Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?’ he exulted to Australian prime minister Robert Menzies in 1941. It was this glee which caused such a man as the aesthete and diarist James Lees-Milne to write fastidiously after it was all over: ‘Churchill so evidently enjoyed the war that I could never like him. I merely acknowledge him, like Genghis Khan, to have been great.’

Lees-Milne and like-minded critics missed an important aspect of Churchill’s attitude to conflict in general, and to the Second World War in particular. He thrilled to the cannon’s roar, and rejoiced in its proximity to himself. Yet never for a moment did he lose his sense of dismay about the death and destruction that war visited upon the innocent. ‘Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime,’ he wrote as a correspondent in South Africa in January 1900. ‘If modern men of light and leading saw your face closer simple folk would see it hardly ever.’ Hitler was indifferent to the sufferings his policies imposed upon mankind. Churchill never flinched from the necessity to pay in blood for the defeat of Nazi tyranny. But his sole purpose was to enable the guns to be silenced, the peoples of the world restored to their peaceful lives.

Appetite for the fray was among Churchill’s most convincing credentials for national leadership in May 1940. Neville Chamberlain had many weaknesses as prime minister, but foremost among them was a revulsion from the conflict to which his country was committed, shared by many members of his government. One of them, Rob Bernays, said: ‘I wish I were twenty. I cannot bear this responsibility.’ A nation which found itself committed to a life-and-death struggle against one of the most ruthless tyrannies in history was surely wise to entrust its leadership to a man eager to embrace the role, rather than one who shrank from it. This book discusses Churchill’s follies and misjudgements, which were many and various. But these are as pimples upon the mountain of his achievement. It is sometimes said that the British and American peoples are still today, in the twenty-first century, indecently obsessed with the Second World War. The reason is not far to seek. We know that here was something which our parents and grandparents did well, in a noble cause that will forever be identified with the person of Winston Churchill, warlord extraordinary.

Max Hastings

Chilton Foliat, Berkshire

May 2009

ONE The Battle of France

For seven months after the Second World War began in September 1939, many British people deluded themselves that it might gutter out before there was a bloodbath in the West. On 5 April 1940, while the armed but passive confrontation which had persisted since the fall of Poland still prevailed on the Franco-German border, prime minister Neville Chamberlain told a Conservative Party meeting: ‘Hitler has missed the bus.’ Less than five weeks later, however, on 7 May, he addressed the House of Commons to explain the disastrous outcome of Britain’s campaign to frustrate the German occupation of Norway. Beginning with a tribute to British troops who had ‘carried out their task with magnificent gallantry’, in halting tones he continued:

I hope that we shall not exaggerate the extent or the importance of the check we have received. The withdrawal from southern Norway is not comparable to the withdrawal from Gallipoli…There were no large forces involved. Not much more than a single division…Still, I am quite aware…that some discouragement has been caused to our friends, and that our enemies are crowing…I want to ask hon. Members not to form any hasty opinions on the result of the Norwegian campaign so far as it has gone…A minister who shows any sign of confidence is always called complacent. If he fails to do so, he is labelled defeatist. For my part I try to steer a middle course—[Interruption]—neither raising undue expectations [Hon. Members: ‘Hitler missed the bus’] which are unlikely to be fulfilled, nor making people’s flesh creep by painting pictures of unmitigated gloom. A great many times some hon. Members have repeated the phrase ‘Hitler missed the bus’—[Hon. Members: ‘You said it’]…While I retain my complete confidence on our ultimate victory, I do not think that the people of this country yet realise the extent or the imminence of the threat which is impending against us [An Hon. Member: ‘We said that five years ago’].

When the debate ended the following night, thirty-three Tories voted against their own party on the Adjournment Motion, and a further sixty abstained. Though Chamberlain retained a parliamentary majority, it was plain that his Conservative government had lost the nation’s confidence. This was not merely the consequence of the Norway campaign, but because through eight fumbling months it had exposed its lack of stomach for war. An all-party coalition was indispensable. Labour would not serve under Chamberlain. Winston Churchill became Britain’s prime minister following a meeting between himself, Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and Tory chief whip David Margesson on the afternoon of 9 May 1940, at which Halifax declared his own unsuitability for the post, as a member of the House of Lords who would be obliged to delegate direction of the war to Churchill in the Commons. In truth, some expedient could have been adopted to allow the Foreign Secretary to return to the Commons. But Halifax possessed sufficient self-knowledge to recognise that no more than Neville Chamberlain did he possess the stuff of a war leader.

While much of the ruling class disliked and mistrusted the new premier, he was the overwhelming choice of the British people. With remarkably sure instinct, they perceived that if they must wage war, the leadership of a warrior was needed. David Reynolds has observed that when the Gallipoli campaign failed in 1915, many people wished to blame Churchill—then, as in 1940, First Lord of the Admiralty—while after Norway nobody did. ‘It was a marvel,’ Churchill wrote in an unpublished draft of his war memoirs, ‘I really do not know how—I survived and maintained my position in public esteem while all the blame was thrown on poor Mr Chamberlain.’ He may also have perceived his own good fortune that he had not achieved the highest office in earlier years, or even in the earlier months of the war. Had he done so, it is likely that by May 1940 his country would have tired of the excesses which he would surely have committed, while being no more capable than Chamberlain of stemming the tide of fate on the Continent. Back in 1935, Stanley Baldwin explained to a friend his unwillingness to appoint Churchill to his own cabinet: ‘If there is going to be a war—and who can say there is not—we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.’ Baldwin’s tone was jocular and patronising, yet there proved to be something in what he said.

In May 1940 only generals and admirals knew the extent of Churchill’s responsibility for Britain’s ill-starred Scandinavian deployments. Nonetheless the familiar view, that he was sole architect of disaster, seems overstated. Had British troops been better trained, motivated and led, they would have made a better showing against Hitler’s forces, which repeatedly worsted them in Norway while often inferior in numbers. The British Army’s failure reflected decades of neglect, together with institutional weaknesses that would influence the fortunes of British arms through the years which followed. These were symbolically attested by a colonel who noticed among officers’ baggage being landed at Namsos on the central Norwegian coast ‘several fishing rods and many sporting guns’. No German officer would have gone to war with such frivolous accoutrements.

Now Halifax wrote disdainfully to a friend: ‘I don’t think WSC will be a very good PM though…the country will think he gives them a fillip.’ The Foreign Secretary told his junior minister R.A. Butler, when they discussed his own refusal to offer himself for the premiership: ‘It’s all a great pity. You know my reasons, it’s no use discussing that—but the gangsters will shortly be in complete control.’ Humbler folk disagreed. Lancashire housewife Nella Last wrote in her diary on 11 May: ‘If I had to spend my whole life with a man, I’d choose Mr Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked. He has a funny face, like a bulldog living in our street who has done more to drive out unwanted dogs and cats…than all the complaints of householders.’ London correspondent Mollie Panter-Downes told New Yorker readers: ‘Events are moving so fast that England acquired a new Premier almost absent-mindedly…It’s paradoxical but true that the British, for all their suspicious dislike of brilliance, are beginning to think they’d be safer with a bit of dynamite around.’ National Labour MP Harold Nicolson, a poor politician but a fine journalist and diarist, wrote in the Spectator of Churchill’s ‘Elizabethan zest for life…His wit…rises high in the air like some strong fountain, flashing in every sunbeam, and renewing itself with ever-increasing jets and gusts of image and association.’

Though Churchill’s appointment was made by the King on the advice of Chamberlain, rather than following any elective process, popular acclaim bore him to the premiership—and to the role as Minister of Defence which he also appropriated. Tory MP Leo Amery was among those sceptical that Churchill could play so many parts: ‘How Winston thinks that he can be Prime Minister, co-ordinator of defence and leader of the House all at once, is puzzling, and confirms my belief that he really means the present arrangement to be temporary. Certainly no one can coordinate defence properly who is not prepared to be active head of the three Chiefs of Staff and in fact directly responsible for plans.’ Critics were still expressing dismay about Churchill’s joint role as national leader and defence minister three years later. Yet this was prompted not by mere personal conceit, but by dismay at the shocking lack of coordination between the services which characterised the Norway campaign. And posterity perceives, as did he himself at the time, that beyond his own eagerness to run Britain’s war machine, there was no other political or military figure to whom delegation of such power would have been appropriate.

In one of the most famous and moving passages of his memoirs, Churchill declared himself on 10 May ‘conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.’ He thrilled to his own ascent to Britain’s leadership. Perhaps he allowed himself a twitch of satisfaction that he could at last with impunity smoke cigars through cabinet meetings, a habit that had annoyed his predecessor. If, however, he cherished a belief that it would be in his gift to shape strategy, events immediately disabused him.

At dawn on 10 May, a few hours before Churchill was summoned to Buckingham Palace, Hitler’s armies stormed across the frontiers of neutral Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Captain David Strangeways, serving with the British Expeditionary Force near Lille just inside the French border, bridled at the impertinence of an orderly room clerk who rushed into the quarters where he lay abed shouting: ‘David, sir, David!’ Then the officer realised that the clerk was passing the order for Operation David, the BEF’s advance from the fortified line which it had held since the previous autumn, deep into Belgium to meet the advancing Germans. Though the Belgians had declared themselves neutrals since 1936, Allied war planning felt obliged to anticipate an imperative requirement to offer them aid if Germany violated their territory.

David perfectly fulfilled Hitler’s predictions and wishes. On 10 May the British, together with the French First and Seventh Armies, hastened to abandon laboriously prepared defensive positions. They mounted their trucks and armoured vehicles, then set off in long columns eastward towards the proffered ‘matador’s cloak’, in Liddell Hart’s phrase, which the Germans flourished before them in Belgium. Further south in the Ardennes forest, Panzer columns thrashed forward to launch one of the war’s great surprises, a thrust at the centre of the Allied line, left inexcusably weak by the deployments of the Allied supreme commander, France’s General Maurice Gamelin. Guderian’s and Reinhardt’s tanks, racing for the Meuse, easily brushed aside French cavalry posturing in their path. Luftwaffe paratroops and glider-borne forces burst upon the Dutch and Belgian frontier fortresses. Stukas and Messerschmitts poured bombs and machine-gun fire upon bewildered formations of four armies.

No more than his nation did the prime minister grasp the speed of approaching catastrophe. The Allied leaders supposed themselves at the beginning of a long campaign. The war was already eight months old, but thus far neither side had displayed impatience for a decisive confrontation. The German descent on Scandinavia was a sideshow. Hitler’s assault on France promised the French and British armies the opportunity, so they supposed, to confront his legions on level terms. The paper strengths of the two sides in the west were similar—about 140 divisions apiece, of which just nine were British. Allied commanders and governments believed that weeks, if not months, would elapse before the critical clash came. Churchill retired to bed on the night of 10 May knowing that the Allies’ strategic predicament was grave, but bursting with thoughts and plans, and believing that he had time to implement them.

Events which tower in the perception of posterity must at the time compete for attention with trifles. The BBC radio announcer who told the nation of the German invasion of Belgium and Holland followed this by reporting: ‘British troops have landed in Iceland,’ as if the second news item atoned for the first. The Times of 11 May 1940 reported the issue of an arrest warrant at Brighton bankruptcy court for a playwright named Walter Hackett, said to have fled to America. An army court martial was described, at which a colonel was charged with ‘undue familiarity’ with a sergeant in his searchlight unit. What would soldiers think, demanded the prosecutor, on hearing a commanding officer address a sergeant as ‘Eric’? Advertisements for Player’s cigarettes exhorted smokers: ‘When cheerfulness is in danger of disturbance, light a Player…with a few puffs put trouble in its proper place.’ The Irish Tourist Association promised: ‘Ireland will welcome you.’ On the front page, a blue Persian cat was offered for sale at £2.10s: ‘house-trained: grandsire Ch. Laughton Laurel; age 7 weeks—Bachelor, Grove Place, Aldenham’. Among Business Offers, a ‘Gentleman with extensive experience wishes join established business, Town or Country, capital available.’ A golf report on the sports page was headed: ‘What the public want.’ There was a poem by Walter de la Mare: ‘O lovely England, whose ancient peace/War’s woful dangers strain and fret.’

The German blitzkrieg was reported under a double-column headline: ‘Hitler strikes at the Low Countries’. Commentaries variously asserted: ‘Belgians confident of victory; ten times as strong as in 1914’; ‘The side of Holland’s economic life of greatest interest to Hitler is doubtless her agricultural and allied activities’; ‘The Military Outlook: No Surprise This Time’. The Times’s editorial column declared:‘It may be taken as certain that every detail has been prepared for an instant strategic reply…The Grand Alliance of our time for the destruction of the forces of treachery and oppression is being steadily marshalled.’

A single column at the right of the main news, on page six, proclaimed: ‘New prime minister. Mr Churchill accepts’. The news-paper’s correspondence was dominated by discussion of Parliament’s Norway debate three days earlier, which had precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Mr Geoffrey Vickers urged that Lord Halifax was by far the best-qualified minister to lead a national government, assisted by a Labour leader of the Commons. Mr Quintin Hogg, Tory MP for Oxford, noted that many of those who had voted against the government were serving officers. Mr Henry Morris-Jones, Liberal MP for Denbigh, deplored the vote that had taken place, observing complacently that he himself had abstained. The news from France was mocked by a beautiful spring day, with bluebells and primroses everywhere in flower.

‘Chips’ Channon, millionaire Tory MP, diarist and consummate ass, wrote on 10 May: ‘Perhaps the darkest day in English history…We were all sad, angry and felt cheated and out-witted.’ His distress was inspired by the fall of Chamberlain, not the blitzkrieg in France. Churchill himself knew better than any man how grudgingly he had been offered the premiership, and how tenuous was his grasp on power. Much of the Conservative Party hated him, not least because he had twice in his life ‘ratted’—changed sides in the House of Commons. He was remembered as architect of the disastrous 1915 Gallipoli campaign, 1919 sponsor of war against the Bolsheviks in Russia, 1933-34 opponent of Indian self-government, 1936 supporter of King Edward VIII in the Abdication crisis, savage backbench critic of both Baldwin and Chamberlain, Tory prime ministers through his own ‘wilderness years’.

In May 1940, while few influential figures questioned Churchill’s brilliance or oratorical genius, they perceived his career as wreathed in misjudgements. Robert Rhodes-James subtitled his 1970 biography of Churchill before he ascended to the premiership A Study in Failure. As early as 1914, the historian A.G. Gardiner wrote an extraordinarily shrewd and admiring assessment of Churchill, which concluded equivocally: ‘ “Keep your eye on Churchill” should be the watchword of these days. Remember, he is a soldier first, last and always. He will write his name big on our future. Let us take care he does not write it in blood.’

Now, amidst the crisis precipitated by Hitler’s blitzkrieg, Churchill’s contemporaries could not forget that he had been wrong about much even in the recent past, and even in the military sphere in which he professed expertise. During the approach to war, he described the presence of aircraft over the battlefield as a mere ‘additional complication’. He claimed that modern anti-tank weapons neutered the powers of ‘the poor tank’, and that ‘the submarine will be mastered…There will be losses, but nothing to affect the scale of events.’ On Christmas Day 1939 he wrote to Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord: ‘I feel we may compare the position now very favourably with that of 1914.’ He had doubted that the Germans would invade Scandinavia. When they did so, Churchill told the Commons on 11 April: ‘In my view, which is shared by my skilled advisers, Herr Hitler has committed a grave strategic error in spreading the war so far to the north…We shall take all we want of this Norwegian coast now, with an enormous increase in the facility and the efficiency of our blockade.’ Even if some of Churchill’s false prophecies and mistaken expressions of confidence were unknown to the public, they were common currency among ministers and commanders.

His claim upon his country’s leadership rested not upon his contribution to the war since September 1939, which was equivocal, but upon his personal character and his record as a foe of appeasement. He was a warrior to the roots of his soul, who found his being upon battlefields. He was one of the few British prime ministers to have killed men with his own hand—at Omdurman in 1898. Now he wielded a sword symbolically, if no longer physically, amid a British body politic dominated by men of paper, creatures of committees and conference rooms. ‘It may well be,’ he enthused six years before the war, ‘that the most glorious chapters of our history have yet to be written. Indeed, the very problems and dangers that encompass us and our country ought to make English men and women of this generation glad to be here at such a time. We ought to rejoice at the responsibilities with which destiny has honoured us, and be proud that we are guardians of our country in an age when her life is at stake.’ Leo Amery had written in March 1940: ‘I am beginning to come round to the idea that Winston with all his failings is the one man with real war drive and love of battle.’ So he was, of course. But widespread fears persisted, that this erratic genius might lead Britain in a rush towards military disaster.

Few of the ministers whom he invited to join his all-party coalition were equal to the magnitude of their tasks. If this is true of all governments at all times, it was notably unfortunate now. Twenty-one out of thirty-six senior office-holders were, like Halifax, David Margesson, Kingsley Wood and Chamberlain himself, veterans of the previous discredited administration. ‘Winston has not been nearly bold enough with his changes and is much too afraid of the [Conservative] Party,’ wrote Amery, who had led the Commons charge against Chamberlain.

Of the Labour recruits—notably Clement Attlee, A.V. Alexander, Hugh Dalton, Arthur Greenwood and Ernest Bevin—only Bevin was a personality of the first rank, though Attlee as deputy prime minister would provide a solid bulwark. Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Liberal leader who had served as an officer under Churchill in France in 1916 and now became Secretary for Air, was described by those contemptuous of his subservience to the new prime minister as ‘head of school’s fag’. Churchill’s personal supporters who received office or promotion, led by Anthony Eden, Lord Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken and Amery, were balefully regarded not only by Chamberlain loyalists, but also by many sensible and informed people who were willing to support the new prime minister, but remained sceptical of his associates.

Much of the political class thought Churchill’s administration would be short-lived. ‘So at last that man has gained his ambition,’ an elderly Tory MP, Cuthbert Headlam, noted sourly. ‘I never thought he would. Well—let us hope that he makes good. I have never believed in him. I only hope that my judgement…will be proved wrong.’ The well-known military writer Captain Basil Liddell Hart wrote gloomily on 11 May: ‘The new War Cabinet appears to be a group devoted to “victory” without regard to its practical possibility.’ Lord Hankey, veteran Whitehall éminence grise and a member of the new government, thought it ‘perfectly futile for war’ and Churchill himself a ‘rogue elephant’.

Even as Hitler’s Panzer columns drove for Sedan and pushed onward through Holland and Belgium, Churchill was filling lesser government posts, interviewing new ministers, meeting officials. On the evening of 10 May Sir Edward Bridges, the shy, austere Cabinet Secretary, called at Admiralty House, where Churchill still occupied the desk from which he had presided as First Lord. Bridges decided that it would be unbecoming for an official who until that afternoon had been serving a deposed prime minister, too obsequiously to welcome the new one. He merely said cautiously: ‘May I wish you every possible good fortune?’ Churchill grunted, gazed intently at Bridges for a moment, then said: ‘Hum. “Every good fortune!” I like that! These other people have all been congratulating me. Every good fortune!’

At Churchill’s first meeting with the chiefs of staff as prime minister on 11 May, he made two interventions, both trifling: he asked whether the police should be armed when sent to arrest enemy aliens, and he pondered the likelihood of Sweden joining the war on the Allied side. Even this most bellicose of men did not immediately attempt to tinker with the movements of Britain’s army on the Continent. When Eden, the new Secretary for War, called on the prime minister that day, he noted in his diary that Churchill ‘seemed well satisfied with the way events were shaping’. If these words reflected a failure to perceive the prime minister’s inner doubts, it is certainly true that he did not perceive the imminence of disaster.

Churchill cherished a faith in the greatness of France, the might of her armed forces, most touching in a statesman of a nation traditionally wary of its Gallic neighbour. ‘In Winston’s eyes,’ wrote his doctor later, ‘France is civilisation.’ Even after witnessing the German conquest of Poland and Scandinavia, Churchill understood little about the disparity between the relative fighting powers of Hitler’s Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, and those of the French and British armies and air forces. He, like almost all his advisers, deemed it unthinkable that the Germans could achieve a breakthrough against France’s Maginot Line and the combined mass of French, British, Dutch and Belgian forces.

In the days that followed his ascent to Downing Street on 10 May, Churchill set about galvanising the British machinery of war and government for a long haul. As war leader, he expected to preside over Britain’s part in a massive and protracted clash on the Continent. His foremost hope was that this would entail no such slaughter as that which characterised the 1914-18 conflict. If he cherished no expectation of swift victory, he harboured no fear of decisive defeat. On 13 May, headlines in The Times asserted confidently: ‘BRITISH FORCES MOVING ACROSS BELGIUM—SUCCESSFUL ENCOUNTERS WITH ENEMY—RAF STRIKES AGAIN’.

Addressing the Commons that day, the prime minister apologised for his brevity: ‘I hope that…my friends…will make allowance, all allowance, for any lack of ceremony with which it has been necessary to act…We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering…But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say: “Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.” ’

Churchill’s war speeches are usually quoted in isolation. This obscures the bathos of remarks by backbench MPs which followed those of the prime minister. On 13 May, Major Sir Philip Colfox, West Dorset, said that although the country must now pursue national unity, he himself much regretted that Neville Chamberlain had been removed from the premiership. Sir Irving Albery, Gravesend, recalled the new prime minister’s assertion: ‘My policy is a policy of war.’ Albery said he thought it right to praise his predecessor’s commitment to the cause of peace. Colonel John Gretton, Burton, injected a rare note of realism by urging the House not to waste words, when ‘the enemy is almost battering at our gates’. The bleakest indication of the Conservative Party’s temper came from the fact that while Neville Chamberlain was cheered as he entered the chamber that day, Churchill’s appearance was greeted with resentful Tory silence.

This, his first important statement, received more applause from abroad than it did from some MPs. The Philadelphia Inquirer editorialised: ‘He proved in this one short speech that he was not afraid to face the truth and tell it. He proved himself an honest man as well as a man of action. Britain has reason to be enheartened by his brevity, his bluntness and his courage.’ Time magazine wrote: ‘That smart, tough, dumpy little man, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, knows how to face facts…Great Britain’s tireless old firebrand has changed the character of Allied warmongering.’

That day, 13 May, the threat of German air attack on Britain caused Churchill to make his first significant military decision: he rejected a proposal for further fighter squadrons to be sent to France to reinforce the ten already committed. But while the news from the Continent was obviously bleak, he asserted that he was ‘by no means sure that the great battle was developing’. He still cherished hopes of turning the tide in Norway, signalling to Admiral Lord Cork and Orrery on 14 May: ‘I hope you will get Narvik cleaned up as soon as possible, and then work southward with increasing force.’

Yet the Germans were already bridging the Meuse at Sedan and Dinant, south of Brussels, for their armoured columns emerging from the Ardennes forests. A huge gap was opening between the French Ninth Army, which was collapsing, and the Second on its left. Though the BEF in Belgium was still not seriously engaged, its C-in-C Lord Gort appealed for air reinforcements. Gort commanded limited confidence. Like all British generals, he lacked training and instincts for the handling of large forces. One of the army’s cleverest staff officers, Colonel Ian Jacob of the war cabinet secretariat, wrote: ‘We have for twenty years thought little about how to win big campaigns on land; we have been immersed in our day-to-day imperial police activities.’

This deficiency, of plausible ‘big battlefield’ commanders, would dog British arms throughout the war. Gort was a famously brave officer who had won a VC in World War I, and still carried himself with a boyish enthusiasm. Maj.Gen. John Kennedy, soon to become Director of Military Operations at the War Office, described the BEF’s C-in-C as ‘a fine fighting soldier’—a useful testimonial for a platoon commander. In blunter words, the general lacked brains, as do most men possessed of the suicidal courage necessary to win a Victoria Cross or Medal of Honor. A shrewd American categorised both Gort and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Edmund Ironside, as ‘purely physical soldiers who had no business in such high places’. Yet Sir Alan Brooke or Sir Bernard Montgomery would have been no more capable of averting disaster in 1940, with the small forces available to the BEF. Unlike most of Continental Europe, Britain had no peacetime conscription for military service until 1939, and thus no large potential reserves for mobilisation. The army Gort commanded was, in spirit, the imperial constabulary of inter-war years, starved of resources for a generation.

On 14 May, for the first time Churchill glimpsed the immensity of the Allies’ peril. Paul Reynaud, France’s prime minister, telephoned from Paris, reporting the German breakthrough and asking for the immediate dispatch of a further ten RAF fighter squadrons. The chiefs of staff committee and the war cabinet, which met successively at 6 and 7 o’clock, agreed that Britain’s home defences should not be thus weakened. At seven next morning, the 15th, Reynaud telephoned personally to Churchill. The Frenchman spoke emotionally, asserting in English: ‘The battle is lost.’ Churchill urged him to steady himself, pointing out that only a small part of the French army was engaged, while the German spearheads were now far extended and thus should be vulnerable to flank attack.

When Churchill reported the conversation to his political and military chiefs, the question of further air support was raised once more. Churchill was briefly minded to accede to Reynaud’s pleas. But Chamberlain sided with Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of Fighter Command, who passionately demurred. No further fighters were committed. That day Jock Colville, the prime minister’s twenty-five-year-old junior private secretary and an aspiring Pepys, noted in his diary the understated concerns of Maj.Gen. Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, chief of staff to Churchill in his capacity as Minister of Defence. Ismay was ‘not too happy about the military situation. He says the French are not fighting properly: they are, he points out, a volatile race and it may take them some time to get into a warlike mood.’

Sluggish perception lagged dreadful reality. Churchill cabled to US president Franklin Roosevelt: ‘I think myself that the battle on land has only just begun, and I should like to see the masses engage. Up to the present, Hitler is working with specialized units in tanks and air.’ He appealed for American aid, and for the first time begged the loan of fifty old destroyers. Washington had already vetoed a request that a British aircraft-carrier should dock at an American port to embark uncrated, battle-ready fighters. This would breach the US Neutrality Act, said the president. So too, he decided, would the dispatch of destroyers.

In France on the 15th, the RAF’s inadequate Battle and Blenheim bombers suffered devastating losses attempting to break the Germans’ Meuse pontoon bridges. A watching Panzer officer wrote: ‘The summer landscape with the quietly flowing river, the light green of the meadows bordered by the darker summits of the more distant heights, spanned by a brilliantly blue sky, is filled with the racket of war…Again and again an enemy aircraft crashes out of the sky, dragging a long black plume of smoke behind it…Occasionally from the falling machines one or two white parachutes release themselves and float slowly to earth.’ The RAF’s sacrifice was anyway too late. Much of the German armour was already across the Meuse, and racing westward.

On the morning of the 16th it was learned in London that the Germans had breached the Maginot Line. The war cabinet agreed to deploy four further fighter squadrons to operate over the battlefield. At 3 o’clock that afternoon the prime minister flew to Paris, accompanied by Ismay and Gen. Sir John Dill, Ironside’s Vice-CIGS. Landing at Le Bourget, for the first time they perceived the desperation of their ally. France’s generals and politicians were waiting upon defeat. As the leaders of the two nations conferred at the Quai d’Orsay, officials burned files in the garden. When Churchill asked about French reserves for a counter-attack, he was told that these were already committed piecemeal. Reynaud’s colleagues did not conceal their bitterness at Britain’s refusal to dispatch further fighters. At every turn of the debate, French shoulders shrugged. From the British embassy that evening, Churchill cabled the war cabinet urging the dispatch of six more squadrons. ‘I…emphasise the mortal gravity of the hour,’ he wrote. The chief of air staff, Sir Cyril Newall, proposed a compromise: six further squadrons should operate over France from their British airfields. At 2 a.m., Churchill drove to Reynaud’s flat to communicate the news. The prime minister thereafter returned to the embassy, slept soundly despite occasional distant gunfire, then flew home via Hendon, where he landed before 9 a.m. on the 17th.

He wore a mask of good cheer, but was no longer in doubt about the catastrophe threatening the Allies. He understood that it had become essential for the BEF to withdraw from its outflanked positions in Belgium. Back in Downing Street, after reporting to the war cabinet he set about filling further minor posts in his government, telephoning briskly to prospective appointees, twelve that day in all. Harold Nicolson recorded a typical conversation:

‘Harold, I think it would be wise if you joined the Government and helped Duff [Cooper] at the Ministry of Information.’

‘There is nothing I should like better.’

‘Well, fall in tomorrow. The list will be out tonight. That all right?’

‘Very much all right.’

‘OK.’

Sir Edward Bridges and other Whitehall officials were impressed by Churchill’s ‘superb confidence’, the ‘unhurried calm with which he set about forming his government’. At the outset, this reflected failure to perceive the immediacy of disaster. Within days, however, there was instead a majestic determination that his own conduct should be seen to match the magnitude of the challenge he and his nation faced. From the moment Churchill gained the premiership, he displayed a self-discipline which had been conspicuously absent from most of his career. In small things as in great, he won the hearts of those who became his intimates at Downing Street. ‘What a beautiful handwriting,’ he told Jock Colville when the private secretary showed him a dictated telegram. ‘But, my dear boy, when I say stop you must write stop and not just put a blob.’ Embracing his staff as an extension of his family, it never occurred to him to warn them against repeating his confidences. He took it for granted that they would not do so—and was rewarded accordingly.

Churchill lunched on 17 May at the Japanese embassy. Even in such circumstances, diplomatic imperatives pressed. Japan’s expansionism was manifest. Everything possible must be done to promote its quiescence. That afternoon he dispatched into exile former Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare, most detested of the old appeasers, to become ambassador to Spain. He also established economic committees to address trade, food and transport. A series of telegrams arrived from France, reporting further German advances. Churchill asked Chamberlain, as Lord President, to assess the implications of the fall of Paris—and of the BEF’s possible withdrawal from the Continent through the Channel ports. His day, which had begun in Paris, ended with dinner at Admiralty House in the company of Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken.

Posterity owes little to Churchill’s wayward son Randolph, but a debt is due for his account of a visit to Admiralty House on the morning of 18 May:

I went up to my father’s bedroom. He was standing in front of his basin and shaving with his old-fashioned Valet razor…

‘Sit down, dear boy, and read the papers while I finish shaving.’ I did as told. After two or three minutes of hacking away, he half turned and said: ‘I think I see my way through.’ He resumed his shaving. I was astounded, and said: ‘Do you mean that we can avoid defeat?’ (which seemed credible) ‘or beat the bastards?’ (which seemed incredible).

He flung his Valet razor into the basin, swung around and said:—‘Of course I mean we can beat them.’

Me: ‘Well, I’m all for it, but I don’t see how you can do it.’

By this time he had dried and sponged his face and turning round to me, said with great intensity: ‘I shall drag the United States in.’

Here was a characteristic Churchillian flash of revelation. The prospect of American belligerence was remote. For years, Neville Chamberlain had repeatedly and indeed rudely cold-shouldered advances from Franklin Roosevelt. Yet already the new prime minister recognised that US aid alone might make Allied victory possible. Eden wrote that day: ‘News no worse this morning, but seems to me too early to call it better. PM and CIGS gave, however, optimistic survey to Cabinet.’ Whatever Churchill told his colleagues, he was now obliged to recognise the probability—though, unlike France’s generals, he refused to bow to its inevitability—of German victory on the Continent. Reports from the battlefield grew steadily graver. Churchill urged the chiefs of staff to consider bringing large reinforcements from India and Palestine, and holding back some tank units then in transit from Britain to the BEF. The threat of a sudden German descent on England, spearheaded by paratroops, seized his imagination, unrealistic though it was.

A Home Intelligence report suggested to the government that national morale was badly shaken: ‘It must be remembered that the defence of the Low Countries had been continually built up in the press…Not one person in a thousand could visualise the Germans breaking through into France…A relieved acceptance of Mr Churchill as prime minister allowed people to believe that a change of leadership would, in itself, solve the consequences of Mr Chamberlain. Reports sent in yesterday and this morning show that disquiet and personal fear have returned.’

That evening of 18 May, the war cabinet agreed that Churchill should broadcast to the nation, making plain the gravity of the emergency. Ministers were told that Mussolini had rejected Britain’s proposal for an Italian declaration of neutrality. This prompted navy minister A.V. Alexander to urge the immediate occupation of Crete, as a base for operations against Italy in the Mediterranean. Churchill dismissed the idea out of hand, saying that Britain was much too committed elsewhere to embark upon gratuitous adventures.

On the morning of Sunday, 19 May, it was learned that the BEF had evacuated Arras, increasing the peril of its isolation from the main French forces. Emerging together from a meeting, Ironside said to Eden: ‘This is the end of the British Empire.’ The Secretary for War noted: ‘Militarily, I did not see how he could be gainsaid.’ Yet it was hard for colleagues to succumb to despair when their leader marvellously sustained his wit. That same bleak Sunday, the prime minister said to Eden: ‘About time number 17 turned up, isn’t it?’ The two of them, at Cannes casino’s roulette wheel in 1938, had backed the number and won twice.

At noon, Churchill was driven across Kent to Chartwell, his beloved old home, shuttered for the duration. He sought an interlude of tranquillity in which to prepare his broadcast to the nation. But he had been feeding his goldfish for only a few minutes when he was interrupted by a telephone call. Gort, in France, was seeking sanction to fall back on the sea at Dunkirk if his predicament worsened. The C-in-C was told instead to seek to re-establish contact with the French army on his right, with German spearheads in between. The French, in their turn, would be urged to counter-attack towards him. The Belgians were pleading for the BEF to hold a more northerly line beside their own troops. The war cabinet determined, however, that the vital priority was to re-establish a common front with the main French armies. The Belgians must be left to their fate, while British forces redeployed south-westwards towards Arras and Amiens.

Broadcasting to the British people that night, Churchill asserted a confidence which he did not feel, that the line in France would be stabilised, but also warned of the peril the nation faced. ‘This is one of the most awe-striking periods in the long history of France and Britain. It is also beyond doubt the most sublime. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: “Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour…for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.” ’

This was the first of his great clarion calls to the nation. It is impossible to overstate its impact upon the British people, and indeed upon the listening world. He asserted his resolve, and his listeners responded. That night he dispatched a minute to Ismay, reasserting his refusal to send further RAF squadrons to France. Every fighter would be needed ‘if it becomes necessary to evacuate the BEF’. It was obvious that this decision would be received badly by the French, and not all his subordinates supported it. His personal scientific and economic adviser, Frederick Lindemann—‘the Prof’—penned a note of protest.

Britain’s forces could exert only a marginal influence on the outcome of the battle for France. Even if every aircraft the RAF possessed had been dispatched to the Continent, such a commitment would not have averted Allied defeat. It would merely have sacrificed the squadrons that later won the Battle of Britain. In May 1940, however, such things were much less plain. As France tottered on the brink of collapse, with five million terrified fugitives clogging roads in a fevered exodus southwards, the bitterness of her politicians and generals mounted against an ally that matched extravagant rhetoric with refusal to provide the only important aid in its gift. France’s leaders certainly responded feebly to Hitler’s blitzkrieg. But their rancour towards Britain merits understanding. Churchill’s perception of British self-interest has been vindicated by history, but scarcely deserved the gratitude of Frenchmen.

He sent an unashamedly desperate message to Roosevelt, regretting America’s refusal to lend destroyers. More, he warned that while his own government would never surrender, a successor administration might parley with Germany, using the Royal Navy as its ‘sole remaining bargaining counter…If this country was left by the United States to its fate, no one would have the right to blame those men responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants. Excuse me, Mr President, putting this nightmare bluntly.’ In Hitler’s hands, Britain’s fleet would pose a grave threat to the United States.

If this was a brutal prospect to lay before Roosevelt, it was by no means a bluff. At that moment Churchill could not know that Parliament and the British people would stick with him to the end. Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservative Party. Even before the crisis in France, a significant part of Britain’s ruling class was susceptible to a compromise peace. Following military catastrophe, it was entirely plausible that Churchill’s government would fall, just as Chamberlain’s had done, to be replaced by an administration which sought terms from Hitler. Only in the months which followed would the world, and Churchill himself, gradually come to perceive that the people of Britain were willing to risk everything under his leadership.

On the 20th he told the chiefs of staff that the time had come to consider whether residual Norwegian operations around Narvik should be sustained, when troops and ships were urgently needed elsewhere. On the Continent, the Germans were driving south and west so fast that it seemed doubtful whether the BEF could regain touch with the main French armies. Gort was still striving to pull back forces from the Scheldt. That night, German units passed Amiens on the hot, dusty road to Abbeville, cutting off the BEF from its supply bases. Still Churchill declined to despair. He told the war cabinet late on the morning of the 21st that ‘the situation was more favourable than certain of the more obvious symptoms would indicate’. In the north, the British still had local superiority of numbers. Fears focused on the perceived pusillanimity of the French, both politicians and soldiers. That day, a British armoured thrust south from Arras failed to break through. The BEF was isolated, along with elements of the French First Army. Calais and Boulogne remained in British hands, but inaccessible by land.

The House of Commons on 20 May, with the kind of inspired madness that contributed to the legend of 1940, debated a Colonial Welfare Bill. Many people in Britain lacked understanding of the full horror of the Allies’ predicament. Newspaper readers continued to receive encouraging tidings. The Evening News headlined on 17 May: ‘BRITISH TROOPS SUCCESS’. On the 19th, the Sunday Dispatch headline read ‘ATTACKS LESS POWERFUL’. Even two days later, the Evening News front page proclaimed ‘ENEMY ATTACKS BEATEN OFF’. An editorial in the New Statesman urged that ‘the government should at once grapple with the minor, but important problem of Anglo-Mexican relations’.

Gort’s chief of staff, Lt.Gen. Henry Pownall, complained bitterly on 20 May about the absence of clear instructions from London: ‘Nobody minds going down fighting, but the long and many days of indigence and recently the entire lack of higher direction…have been terribly wearing on the nerves of all of us.’ But when orders did come from the prime minister three days later—for a counterattack south-eastwards by the entire BEF—Pownall was even angrier: ‘Can nobody prevent him trying to conduct operations himself as a super Commander-in-Chief ? How does he think we are to collect eight divisions and attack as he suggests? Have we no front to hold? He can have no conception of our situation and condition…The man’s mad.’

Only the port of Dunkirk still offered an avenue of escape from the Continent, and escape now seemed the BEF’s highest credible aspiration. On the 22nd and 23rd, the British awaited tidings of the promised French counter-offensive north-eastward, towards Gort. Gen. Maxime Weygand, who had supplanted the sacked Gamelin as Allied supreme commander, declared this to be in progress. In the absence of visible movement Churchill remained sceptical. If Weygand’s thrust failed, evacuation would become the only British option. Churchill reported as much to the King on the night of 23 May, as Boulogne was evacuated. On the night of the 24th he fumed to Ismay about Gort’s failure to launch a force towards Calais to link up with its garrison, and demanded how men and guns could be better used. He concluded, in the first overtly bitter and histrionic words which he had deployed against Britain’s soldiers since the campaign began: ‘Of course, if one side fights and the other does not, the war is apt to become somewhat unequal.’ Ironside, the CIGS, told the Defence Committee that evening that if the BEF was indeed evacuated by sea from France, a large proportion of its men might be lost.

Churchill was now preoccupied with three issues: rescue of Gort’s men from Dunkirk; deployment of further units of the British Army to renew the battle in France following the BEF’s withdrawal; and defence of the home island against invasion. Reynaud dispatched a bitter message to London on the 24th, denouncing the British retreat to the sea and blaming this for the failure of Weygand’s counter-offensive—which in truth had never taken place. ‘Everything is complete confusion,’ Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, noted in his diary on the 25th, ‘no communications and no one knows what’s going on, except that everything’s black as black.’

Churchill cabled to the Dominion prime ministers, warning that an invasion of Britain might be imminent. He rejoiced that reinforcements from the Empire were on their way, and asserted his confidence that the Royal Navy and RAF should be able to frustrate an assault, following which ‘our land defence will deal with any sea-borne survivors after some rough work’. He rejected the notion of a public appeal to the United States. He feared, surely correctly, that such a message would have scant appeal to a nation already disposed to dismiss aid to Britain as wasted motion. In this, as in his judgement of shifting American moods through the months that followed, he displayed much wisdom. A Gallup poll showed Americans still overwhelmingly opposed, by thirteen to one, to participation in the European conflict.

On 25 May, Churchill dispatched a personal message to Brigadier Claude Nicholson, commanding the British force in Calais, ordering that his men must fight to the end. The Belgians were collapsing. Gort cancelled his last planned counter-attack southward, instead sending north the two divisions earmarked for it, to plug the gap between British and Belgian forces. That evening, at a meeting of the Defence Committee, Churchill accepted the conclusion which Gort, now out of contact with London, had already reached and begun to act upon. The BEF must withdraw to the coast for evacuation. The commander-in-chief’s order, issued in advance of consent from Britain, represented his most notable contribution to the campaign, and by no means a negligible one. The prime minister ordered that six skeleton divisions in Britain should be urgently prepared for active service, though scant means existed to accomplish this. Artillery, anti-tank weapons, transport, even small arms were lacking. He acknowledged that France’s leaders, resigned to defeat, would probably depose Reynaud and make terms with Hitler. Henceforward, the future of the French fleet was much in his mind. In German hands, these warships might drastically improve the odds favouring a successful invasion of Britain. That night, Ironside resigned as CIGS, to become commander-in-chief home forces. The general had never commanded Churchill’s confidence, while Sir John Dill, Ironside’s vice-chief, did. Next day Dill, fifty-nine years old, clever and sensitive though seldom in good health, became head of the British Army.

At 9 o’clock on the morning of the 26th, Churchill told the war cabinet there was a good chance of ‘getting off a considerable proportion of the British Expeditionary Force’. Paul Reynaud arrived in London. He warned the prime minister over lunch that if Germany occupied a large part of France, the nation’s old hero Marshal Philippe Pétain would probably call for an armistice. Reynaud dismissed British fears that the Germans were bent on an immediate invasion of their island. Hitler would strike for Paris, he said, and of course he was right. Churchill told Reynaud that Britain would fight on, whatever transpired. Following a break while he met the war cabinet, the two leaders resumed their talks. Churchill pressed for Weygand to issue an order for the BEF to fall back on the coast. This was designed to frustrate charges of British betrayal. Reynaud duly requested such a message, to endorse the reality of what was already taking place.

At a four-hour war cabinet meeting that afternoon, following Reynaud’s departure, the merits of seeking a settlement with Hitler were discussed. Churchill hoped that France might receive terms that precluded her occupation by the Germans. Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, expressed his desire to seek Italian mediation with Hitler, to secure terms for Britain. He had held preliminary talks with Mussolini’s ambassador in London about such a course. Churchill was sceptical, saying this presupposed that a deal might be made merely by returning Germany’s old colonies, and making concessions in the Mediterranean. ‘No such option was open to us,’ said the prime minister.

Six Alexander Cadogan, who joined the meeting after half an hour, found Churchill ‘too rambling and romantic and sentimental and temperamental’. This was harsh. The prime minister bore vast burdens. It behoved him to be circumspect in all dealings with the old appeasers among his colleagues. There were those in Whitehall who, rather than being stirred by Churchill’s appeals to recognise a great historic moment, curled their lips. Chamberlain’s private secretary, Arthur Rucker, responded contemptuously to the ringing phrases in one of the prime minister’s missives: ‘He is still thinking of his books.’ Eric Seal, the only one of Churchill’s private secretaries who established no close rapport with him,* muttered about ‘blasted rhetoric’.

A substantial part of the British ruling class, MPs and peers alike, had since September 1939 lacked faith in the possibility of military victory. Although Churchill was himself an aristocrat, he was widely mistrusted by his own kind. Since the 1917 Russian Revolution, many British grandees, including such dukes as Westminster, Wellington and Buccleuch, and such lesser peers as Lord Phillimore, had shown themselves much more hostile to Soviet communism than to European fascism. Their patriotism was never in doubt. However, their enthusiasm for a fight to the finish with Hitler, which they feared would end in rubble and ruin, was less assured. Lord Hankey observed acidly before making a speech to the House of Lords early in May that he ‘would be addressing most of the members of the Fifth Column’.

Lord Tavistock, soon to become Duke of Bedford, a pacifist and plausible quisling, wrote to former prime minister David Lloyd George that Hitler’s strength was ‘so great…it is madness to suppose we can beat him by war on the continent’. On 15 May, Tavistock urged Lloyd George that peace should be made ‘now rather than later…If the Germans received fair peace terms a dozen Hitlers could never start another war on an inadequate…pretext.’ Likewise, some financial magnates in the City of London were sceptical of any possibility of British victory, and thus of Churchill. Harold Nicolson wrote: ‘It is not the descendants of the old governing classes who display the greatest enthusiasm for their leader…Mr Chamberlain is the idol of the business men…They do not have the same personal feelings for Mr Churchill…There are awful moments when they feel that Mr Churchill does not find them interesting.’

There were also defeatists lower down the social scale. Muriel Green, who worked at her family’s garage in Norfolk, recorded a conversation at a local tennis match with a grocer’s roundsman and a schoolmaster on 23 May. ‘I think they’re going to beat us, don’t you?’ said the roundsman. ‘Yes,’ said the schoolmaster. He added that as the Nazis were very keen on sport, he expected ‘we’d still be able to play tennis if they did win’. Muriel Green wrote: ‘J said Mr M. was saying we should paint a swastika under the door knocker ready. We all agreed we shouldn’t know what to do if they invade. After that we played tennis, very hard exciting play for 2 hrs, and forgot all about the war.’

In those last days of May, the prime minister must have perceived a real possibility, even a likelihood, that if he himself appeared irrationally intransigent, the old Conservative grandees would reassert themselves. Amid the collapse of all the hopes on which Britain’s military struggle against Hitler were founded, it was not fanciful to suppose that a peace party might gain control in Britain. Some historians have made much of the fact that at this war cabinet meeting Churchill failed to dismiss out of hand an approach to Mussolini. He did not flatly contradict Halifax when the Foreign Secretary said that if the Duce offered terms for a general settlement ‘which did not postulate the destruction of our independence…we should be foolish if we did not accept them’. Churchill conceded that ‘if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies, he would jump at it’. At the following day’s war cabinet he indicated that if Hitler was prepared to offer peace in exchange for the restoration of his old colonies and the overlordship of central Europe, a negotiation could be possible.

It seems essential to consider Churchill’s words in context. First, they were made in the midst of long, weary discussions, during which he was taking elaborate pains to appear reasonable. Halifax spoke with the voice of logic. Amid shattering military defeat, even Churchill dared not offer his colleagues a vision of British victory. In those Dunkirk days, the Director of Military Intelligence told a BBC correspondent: ‘We’re finished. We’ve lost the army and we shall never have the strength to build another.’ Churchil did not challenge the view of those who assumed that the war would end, sooner or later, with a negotiated settlement rather than with a British army marching into Berlin. He pitched his case low because there was no alternative. A display of exaggerated confidence would have invited ridicule. He relied solely upon the argument that there was no more to lose by fighting on, than by throwing in the hand.

How would his colleagues, or even posterity, have assessed his judgement had he sought at those meetings to offer the prospect of

military triumph? To understand what happened in Britain in the summer of 1940, it is essential to acknowledge the logic of impending defeat. This was what created tensions between the hearts and minds even of staunch and patriotic British people. The best aspiration they, and their prime minister, could entertain was a manly determination to survive today, and to pray for a better tomorrow. The war cabinet discussions between 26 and 28 May took place while it was still doubtful that any significant portion of the BEF could be saved from France.

At the meeting of 26 May, with the support of Attlee, Greenwood and eventually Chamberlain, Churchill summed up for the view that there was nothing to be lost by fighting on, because no terms which Hitler might offer in the future were likely to be worse than those now available. Having discussed the case for a parley, he dismissed it, even if Halifax refused to do so. At 7 o’clock that evening, an hour after the war cabinet meeting ended, the Admiralty signalled the Flag Officer Dover, Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay: ‘Operation Dynamo is to commence.’ The destroyers of the Royal Navy, aided by a fleet of small craft, began to evacuate the BEF from Dunkirk.

That night yet another painful order was forced upon Churchill. The small British force at Calais, drawn from the Rifle Brigade, had only nuisance value. But everything possible must be done to distract German forces from the Dunkirk perimeter. The Rifles had to resist to the last. Ismay wrote: ‘The decision affected us all very deeply, especially perhaps Churchill. He was unusually silent during dinner that evening, and ate and drank with evident distaste.’ He asked a private secretary, John Martin, to find for him a passage in George Borrow’s 1843 prayer for England. Martin identified the lines next day: ‘Fear not the result, for either thy end be a majestic and an enviable one, or God shall perpetuate thy reign upon the waters.’

On the morning of the 27th, even as British troops were beginning to embark at Dunkirk, Churchill asked the leaders of the armed forces to prepare a memorandum setting out the nation’s prospects of resisting invasion if France fell. Within a couple of hours the chiefs of staff submitted an eleven-paragraph response that identified the key issues with notable insight. As long as the RAF was ‘in being’, they wrote, its aircraft together with the warships of the Royal Navy should be able to prevent an invasion. If air superiority was lost, however, the navy could not indefinitely hold the Channel. Should the Germans secure a beachhead in south-east England, British home forces would be incapable of evicting them. The chiefs pinpointed the air battle, Britain’s ability to defend its key installations, and especially aircraft factories, as the decisive factors in determining the future course of the war. They concluded with heartening words: ‘The real test is whether the morale of our fighting personnel and civil population will counter-balance the numerical and material advantages which Germany enjoys. We believe it will.’

The war cabinet debated at length, and finally accepted, the chiefs’ report. It was agreed that further efforts should be made to induce the Americans to provide substantial aid. An important message arrived from Lord Lothian, British ambassador in Washington, suggesting that Britain should invite the US to lease basing facilities in Trinidad, Newfoundland and Bermuda. Churchill opposed any such unilateral offer. America had ‘given us practically no help in the war’, he said. ‘Now that they saw how great was the danger, their attitude was that they wanted to keep everything that would help us for their own defence.’ This would remain the case until the end of the battle for France. There was no doubt of Roosevelt’s desire to help, but he was constrained by the terms of the Neutrality Act imposed by Congress. On 17 May Gen. George Marshall, chief of the army, expounded to US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau his objections to shipping American arms to the Allies: ‘It is a drop in the bucket on the other side and it is a very vital necessity on this side and that is that. Tragic as it is, that is it.’ Between 23 May and 3 June US Secretary of War Harry Woodring, an ardent isolationist, deliberately delayed shipment to Britain of war material condemned as surplus. He insisted that there must be prior public advertisement before such equipment was sold to the Allies. On 5 June, the Senate foreign relations committee rejected an administration proposal to sell ships and planes to Britain. The US War Department declined to supply bombs to fit dive-bombers which the French had already bought and paid for.

In the last days of May, a deal for Britain to purchase twenty US patrol torpedo boats was scuttled when news of it leaked to isolationist Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts. As chairman of the Senate’s Navy Affairs Committee, Walsh referred the plan to the attorney-general—who declared it illegal. In mid-June, the US chiefs of staff recommended that no further war material should be sent to Britain, and that no private contractor should be allowed to accept an order which might compromise the needs of the US armed forces. None of this directly influenced the campaign in France. But it spoke volumes, all unwelcome in London and Paris, about the prevailing American mood towards Europe’s war.

It was a small consolation that other powerful voices across the Atlantic were urging Britain’s cause. The New York Times attacked Colonel Charles Lindbergh, America’s arch-isolationist flying hero, and asserted the mutuality of Anglo-American interests. Lindbergh, said the Times, was ‘an ignorant young man if he trusts his own premise that it makes no difference to us whether we are deprived of the historic defense of British sea power in the Atlantic Ocean’. The Republican New York Herald Tribune astonished many Americans by declaring boldly: ‘The least costly solution in both life and welfare would be to declare war on Germany at once.’ Yet even if President Roosevelt had wished to heed the urgings of such interventionists and offer assistance to the Allies, he had before him the example of Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration he served. Wilson was renounced by his own legislature in 1919 for making commitments abroad—in the Versailles Treaty—which outreached the will of the American people. Roosevelt had no intention of emulating him.

Chamberlain reported on 27 May that he had spoken the previous evening to Stanley Bruce, Australian high commissioner in London, who argued that Britain’s position would be bleak if France surrendered. Bruce, a shrewd and respected spokesman for his dominion, urged seeking American or Italian mediation with Hitler. Australia’s prime minister, Robert Menzies, was fortunately made of sterner stuff. From Canberra, Menzies merely enquired what assistance his country’s troops could provide. By autumn, three Australian divisions were deployed in the Middle East. Churchill told Chamberlain to make plain to Bruce that France’s surrender would not influence Britain’s determination to fight on. He urged ministers—and emphasised the message in writing a few days later—to present bold faces to the world. Likewise, a little later he instructed Britain’s missions abroad to entertain lavishly, prompting embassy parties in Madrid and Berne. In Churchill’s house, even amid disaster there was no place for glum countenances.

At a further war cabinet that afternoon, Halifax found himself unsupported when he returned to his theme of the previous day, seeking agreement that Britain should solicit Mussolini’s help in exploring terms from Hitler. Churchill said that at that moment, British prestige in Europe was very low. It could be revived only by defiance. ‘If, after two or three months, we could show that we were still unbeaten, we should be no worse off than we should be if we were now to abandon the struggle. Let us therefore avoid being dragged down the slippery slope with France.’ If terms were offered, he would be prepared to consider them. But if the British were invited to send a delegate to Paris to join with the French in suing for peace with Germany, the answer must be ‘no’. The war cabinet agreed.

Halifax wrote in his diary: ‘I thought Winston talked the most frightful rot. I said exactly what I thought of [the Foreign Secretary’s opponents in the war cabinet], adding that if that was really their view, our ways must part.’ In the garden afterwards, when he repeated his threat of resignation, Churchill soothed him with soft words. Halifax concluded in his diary record: ‘It does drive one to despair when he works himself up into a passion of emotion when he ought to make his brain think and reason.’ He and Chamberlain recoiled from Churchill’s ‘theatricality’, as Cadogan described it. Cold men both, they failed to perceive in such circumstances the necessity for at least a semblance of boldness. But Chamberlain’s eventual support for Churchill’s stance was critically important in deflecting the Foreign Secretary’s proposals.

Whichever narratives of these exchanges are consulted, the facts seem plain. Halifax believed that Britain should explore terms. Churchill must have been deeply alarmed by the prospect of the Foreign Secretary, the man whom only three weeks earlier most of the Conservative Party wanted as prime minister, quitting his government. It was vital, at this moment of supreme crisis, that Britain should present a united face to the world. Churchill could never thereafter have had private confidence in Halifax. He continued to endure him as a colleague, however, because he needed to sustain the support of the Tories. It was a measure of Churchill’s apprehension about the resolve of Britain’s ruling class that it would be another seven months before he felt strong enough to consign ‘the Holy Fox’ to exile.

The legend of Britain in the summer of 1940 as a nation united in defiance of Hitler is rooted in reality. It is not diminished by asserting that if another man had been prime minister, the political faction resigned to seeking a negotiated peace would probably have prevailed. What Churchill grasped, and Halifax and others did not, was that the mere gesture of exploring peace terms must impact disastrously upon Britain’s position. Even if Hitler’s response proved unacceptable to a British government, the clear, simple Churchillian posture, of rejecting any parley with the forces of evil, would be irretrievably compromised.

It is impossible to declare with confidence at what moment during the summer of 1940 Churchill’s grip upon power, as well as his hold upon the loyalties of the British people, became secure. What is plain is that in the last days of May he did not perceive himself proof against domestic foes. He survived in office not because he overcame the private doubts of ministerial and military sceptics, which he did not, but by the face of courage and defiance that he presented to the nation. He appealed over the heads of those who knew too much, to those who were willing to sustain a visceral stubbornness. ‘His world is built upon the primacy of public over private relationships,’ wrote the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in a fine essay on Churchill, ‘upon the supreme value of action, of the battle between simple good and simple evil, between life and death; but above all battle. He has always fought.’ The simplicity of Churchill’s commitment, matched by the grandeur of the language in which he expressed this, seized popular imagination. In the press, in the pubs and everywhere that Churchill himself appeared on his travels across the country, the British people passionately applauded his defiance. Conservative seekers after truce were left beached and isolated; sullenly resentful, but impotent.

Evelyn Waugh’s fictional Halberdier officer, the fastidious Guy Crouchback, was among many members of the British upper classes who were slow to abandon their disdain for the prime minister, displaying an attitude common among real-life counterparts such as Waugh himself:

Some of Mr Churchill’s broadcasts had been played on the mess wireless-set. Guy had found them painfully boastful and they had, most of them, been immediately followed by the news of some disaster…Guy knew of Mr Churchill only as a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, an advocate of the Popular Front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and Lloyd George. He was asked: ‘Uncle, what sort of fellow is this Winston Churchill?’ ‘Like Hore-Belisha [sacked Secretary for War, widely considered a charlatan], except that for some reason his hats are thought to be funny’…Here Major Erskine leant across the table. ‘Churchill is about the only man who may save us from losing this war,’ he said. It was the first time that Guy had heard a Halberdier suggest that any result, other than complete victory, was possible.

Some years before the war, the diplomat Lord D’Abernon observed with patrician complacency that ‘An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.’ In May 1940, he might have perceived Churchill as an exemplar of his words.

* Seal departed from Downing Street in 1941.

TWO The Two Dunkirks

On 28 May, Churchill learned that the Belgians had surrendered at dawn. He repressed until much later his private bitterness, unjustified though this was when Belgium had no rational prospect of sustaining the fight. He merely observed that it was not for him to pass judgement upon King Leopold’s decision. Overnight a few thousand British troops had been retrieved from Dunkirk, but Gort was pessimistic about the fate of more than 200,000 who remained, in the face of overwhelming German air power. ‘And so here we are back on the shores of France on which we landed with such high hearts over eight months ago,’ Pownall, Gort’s chief of staff, wrote that day. ‘I think we were a gallant band who little deserve this ignominious end to our efforts…If our skill be not so great, our courage and endurance are certainly greater than that of the Germans.’ The stab of self-knowledge reflected in Pownall’s phrase about the inferior professionalism of the British Army lingered in the hearts of its intelligent soldiers until 1945.

That afternoon at a war cabinet meeting in Churchill’s room at the Commons, the prime minister again—and for the last time—rejected Halifax’s urgings that the government could obtain better peace terms before France surrendered and British aircraft factories were destroyed. Chamberlain, as ever a waverer, now supported the Foreign Secretary in urging that Britain should consider ‘decent terms if such were offered to us’. Churchill said that the odds were a thousand to one against any such Hitlerian generosity, and warned that ‘nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished’. Attlee and Greenwood, the Labour members, endorsed Churchill’s view. This was the last stand of the old appeasers. Privately, they adhered to the view, shared by former prime minister Lloyd George, that sooner or later negotiation with Germany would be essential. As late as 17 June, the Swedish ambassador reported Halifax and his junior minister R.A. Butler declaring that no ‘diehards’ would be allowed to stand in the way of peace ‘on reasonable conditions’. Andrew Roberts has convincingly argued that Halifax was not directly complicit in remarks made during a chance conversation between Butler and the envoy. But it remains extraordinary that some historians have sought to qualify verdicts on the Foreign Secretary’s behaviour through the summer of 1940. It was not dishonourable – the lofty eminence could never have been that. But it was craven.

Immediately following the 28 May meeting, some twenty-five other ministers – all those who were not members of the war cabinet – filed into the room to be briefed by the prime minister. He described the situation at Dunkirk, anticipated the French collapse, and expressed his conviction that Britain must fight on. ‘He was quite magnificent,’ wrote Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, ‘the man, and the only man we have, for this hour…He was determined to prepare public opinion for bad tidings…Attempts to invade us would no doubt be made.’ Churchill told ministers that he had considered the case for negotiating with ‘that man’ – and rejected it. Britain’s position, with its fleet and air force, remained strong. He concluded with a magnificent peroration: ‘I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’

He was greeted with acclamation extraordinary at any assembly of ministers. No word of dissent was uttered. The meeting represented an absolute personal triumph. He reported its outcome to the war cabinet. That night, the British government informed Reynaud in Paris of its refusal of Italian mediation for peace terms. A further suggestion by Halifax of a direct call upon the United States was dismissed. A bold stand against Germany, Churchill reiterated, would carry vastly more weight than ‘a grovelling appeal’ at such a moment. At the following day’s war cabinet, new instructions to Gort were discussed. Halifax favoured giving the C-in-C discretion to capitulate. Churchill would hear of no such thing. Gort was told to fight on at least until further evacuation from Dunkirk became impossible. Mindful of Allied reproaches, he told the War Office that French troops in the perimeter must be allowed access to British ships. He informed Reynaud of his determination to create a new British Expeditionary Force, based on the Atlantic port of Saint-Nazaire, to fight alongside the French army in the west.

All through those days, the evacuation from the port and beaches continued, much hampered by lack of small craft to ferry troops out to the larger ships, a deficiency which the Admiralty strove to make good by a public appeal for suitable vessels. History has invested the saga of Dunkirk with a dignity less conspicuous to those present. John Horsfall, a company commander of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, told a young fellow officer: ‘I hope you realise your distinction. You are now taking part in the greatest military shambles ever achieved by the British Army.’ Many rank-and-file soldiers returned from France nursing a lasting resentment towards the military hierarchy that had exposed them to such a predicament. Horsfall noticed that in the last phase of the march to the beaches, his men fell unnaturally silent: ‘There was a limit to what any of us could absorb, with those red fireballs flaming skywards every few minutes, and I suppose we just reached the point where there was little left to say.’ They were joined by a horse artillery major, superb in Savile Row riding breeches and scarlet and gold forage cap, who said: ‘I’m a double blue at this, old boy – I was at Mons [in 1914].’ A young Grenadier Guards officer, Edward Ford, passed the long hours of waiting for a ship reading a copy of Chapman’s Homer which he found in the sands. For the rest of his days, Ford was nagged by unsatisfied curiosity about who had abandoned his Chapman amid the detritus of the beaches.

Though the Royal Navy’s achievement at Dunkirk embraced its highest traditions, many men noted only the chaos. ‘It does seem to me incredible that the organisation of the beach work should have been so bad,’ wrote Lt. Robert Hichens of the minesweeper Niger, though he admired the absence of panic among embarking soldiers.

We were told that there would be lots of boats and that the embarkation of the troops would all be organised…That was what all the little shore boats were being brought over from England for…One can only come to the conclusion that the civilians and small boats packed up and went home with a few chaps instead of staying there to ferry to the big ships which was their proper job. As for the shore organisation, it simply did not exist…It makes one a bit sick when one hears the organisers of the beach show being cracked up to the skies on the wireless and having DSOs showered upon them, because a more disgraceful muddle and lack of organisation I have never seen…If a few officers had been put ashore with a couple of hundred sailors…the beach evacuation would have been a different thing…When the boats were finally hoisted I found that I was very tired and very hoarse as well as soaking wet. So I had a drink and then changed. I had an artillery officer in my cabin who was very interesting. They all seem to have been very impressed by the dive bombers and the vast number of them, and by the general efficiency of the German forces. The soldiers are not very encouraging, but they were very tired which always makes one pessimistic, and they had been out of touch for a long time. This officer did not even know that Churchill had replaced Chamberlain as Premier.

Pownall arrived in London from France to describe to the defence committee on 30 May Gort’s plans for holding the Dunkirk perimeter. ‘No one in the room,’ wrote Ian Jacob of the war cabinet secretariat, ‘imagined that they could be successful if the German armoured divisions supported by the Luftwaffe pressed their attack.’ It was, of course, a decisive mercy that no such attack was ‘pressed’. In the course of the Second World War, victorious German armies displayed a far more consistent commitment to completing the destruction of their enemies when opportunity offered than did the Allies in similarly advantageous circumstances. Dunkirk was an exception. Most of the BEF escaped not as a consequence of Hitler’s forbearance, but through a miscellany of fortuities and misjudgements. Success beyond German imagination created huge problems of its own. Commanders’ attention was fixed upon completing the defeat of Weygand’s forces, of which large elements remained intact. The broken country around Dunkirk was well suited to defence. The French First Army, south of the port, engaged important German forces through the critical period for the BEF’s escape, a stand which received less credit from the British than it deserved.

On 24 May von Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, ordered his Panzers, badly in need of a logistical pause, not to cross the Aa canal and entangle themselves with British ‘remnants’, as Gort’s army was now perceived. Hitler supported his decision. He was amenable to Goering’s eagerness to show that his aircraft could complete the destruction of the BEF. Yet, in the words of the most authoritative German history, ‘The Luftwaffe, badly weakened by earlier operations, was unable to meet the demands made on it.’ In the course of May, Goering’s force lost 1,044 aircraft, a quarter of them fighters. Thanks to the efforts of the RAF’s Fighter Command over Dunkirk, the German Fourth Army’s war diary recorded on the 25th: ‘The enemy has had air superiority. This is something new for us in this campaign.’ On 3 June the German air effort was diverted from Dunkirk, to increase pressure on the French by bombing targets around Paris.

Almost the entire RAF Air Striking Force was reduced to charred wreckage, strewn the length of northern France. It scarcely seemed to the Germans to matter if a few thousand British troops escaped in salt-stained battledress, when they left behind every tool of a modern army – tanks, guns, trucks, machine-guns and equipment. Hitler’s failure to complete the demolition of the BEF represented a historic blunder, but an unsurprising one amid the magnitude of German triumphs and dilemmas in the last days of May 1940. The Allies, with much greater superiority, indulged far more culpable strategic omissions when they returned to the Continent for the campaigns of 1943–45.

Ian Jacob was among those impressed by the calm with which Churchill received Pownall’s Dunkirk situation report of 30 May. Thereafter, the war cabinet addressed another budget of French requests: for troops to support them on the Somme front; more aircraft; concessions to Italy; a joint appeal to Washington. Churchill interpreted these demands as establishing a context for French surrender, once Britain had refused them. The decision was taken to withdraw residual British forces from north Norway. The prime minister determined to fly again to Paris to press France to stay in the war, and to make plain that Britain would dissociate itself from any parley with Germany mediated by the Italians. Next morning, as Churchill’s Flamingo took off from Northolt, he knew that 133,878 British and 11,666 Allied troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk.

The prime minister’s old friend Sir Edward Spears, viewed by his fellow generals as a mountebank, was once more serving as a British liaison officer with the French, a role he had filled in World War I. Spears, waiting at Villacoubray airfield to meet the party, was impressed by the prime minister’s imposture of gaiety. Churchill poked the British officer playfully in the stomach with his stick, and as ever appeared stimulated by finding himself upon the scene of great events. He beamed upon the pilots of the escorting Hurricanes which had landed behind him, was driven into Paris for lunch at the British embassy, then went to see Reynaud at the Ministry of War.

Amid the gloom that beset all France’s leaders, gathered with her prime minister, Pétain and Admiral Jean François Darlan showed themselves foremost in despair. As Ismay described it: ‘A dejected-looking old man in plain clothes shuffled towards me, stretched out his hand and said: “Pétain.” It was hard to believe that this was the great Marshal of France.’ The rationalists, as they saw themselves, listened unmoved to Churchill’s outpouring of rhetoric. He spoke of the two British divisions already in north-western France, which he hoped could be further reinforced to assist in the defence of Paris. He described in dramatic terms the events at Dunkirk. He declared in his extraordinary franglais, reinforced by gestures, that French and British soldiers would leave arm in arm – ‘partage – bras dessus, bras dessous’. On cabinet orders, Gort was to quit Dunkirk that night. If, as expected, Italy entered the war, British bomber squadrons would at once strike at her industries. Churchill beamed once more. If only France could hold out through the summer, he said, all manner of possibilities would open. In a final surge of emotion, he declared his conviction that American help would come. Thus this thirteenth meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council concluded its agenda.

Reynaud and two other ministers were guests for dinner that night at the palatial British embassy in the rue Saint-Honoré. Churchill waxed lyrical about the possibility of launching striking forces against German tank columns. He left Paris next morning knowing he had done all that force of personality could achieve to breathe inspiration into the hearts of the men charged with saving France. Yet few believed a word of it. The Allies’ military predicament was irretrievably dire. It was impossible to conceive any plausible scenario in which Hitler’s armies might be thrown back, given the collapse of French national will.

Paul Reynaud was among a handful of Frenchmen who, momentarily at least, remained susceptible to Churchill’s verbiage. To logical minds, there was an absurdity about almost everything the Englishman said to ministers and commanders in Paris. Britain’s prime minister paraded before his ally his own extravagant sense of honour. He promised military gestures which might further weaken his own country, but could not conceivably save France. He made wildly fanciful pledges of further military aid, though its impact must be insignificant. Britain’s two divisions in the north-west were irrelevant to the outcome of the battle, and were desperately needed to defend the home island. But Churchill told the war cabinet in London on 1 June that more troops must be dispatched across the Channel, with a suitable air component. Even as the miracle of Dunkirk unfolded, he continued to waver about dispatching further fighters to the Continent. He trumpeted the success of the RAF in preventing the Luftwaffe from frustrating the evacuation, which he declared a splendid omen for the future.

Chamberlain and Halifax urged against sending more men to France, but Churchill dissented. He felt obliged to respond to fresh appeals from Reynaud. He envisaged a British enclave in Brittany, a base from which the French might be inspired and supported to maintain ‘a gigantic guerrilla…The B.E.F. in France must immediately be reconstituted, otherwise the French will not continue in the war.’ Amid the dire shortage of troops, he committed to France 1st Canadian Division, which had arrived in Britain virtually untrained and unequipped. The prime minister told one of the British generals who would be responsible for sustaining the defence of north-west France that ‘he could count on no artillery’. An impromptu new ‘division’ was created around Rouen from lines of communications personnel equipped with a few Bren and antitank guns which they had never fired, and a single battery of field artillery that lacked dial sights for its guns. Until Lt.Gen. Alan Brooke, recently landed from Dunkirk, returned to France on 12 June, British forces there remained under French command, with no national C-in-C on the spot.

By insisting upon resumption of an utterly doomed campaign, Churchill made his worst mistake of 1940. It is unsurprising that his critics in the inner circle of power were dismayed. The strength of Churchill’s emotions was wonderful to behold. But when sentiment drove him to make deployments with no possibility of success, he appalled his generals, as well as the old Chamberlainite umbrellamen. Almost every senior civilian and uniformed figure in Whitehall recognised that the Battle of France was lost. Further British commitments threatened to negate the extraordinary deliverance of Dunkirk. The Air Staff closed ranks with Halifax, Chamberlain and others to resist Churchill’s demands that more fighters should be sent to France, in addition to the three British squadrons still operating there. On the air issue, Churchill himself havered, then reluctantly gave way. This was the first of many occasions on which he mercifully subordinated his instincts to the advice of service chiefs and colleagues. Chamberlain and Halifax were not wrong about everything. The moral grandeur in Churchill’s gestures towards his ally in the first days of June was entirely subsumed by the magnitude of France’s tragedy and Britain’s peril.

The Dunkirk evacuation approached a conclusion on 4 June, by which time 224,328 British troops had been evacuated, along with 111,172 Allied troops, most of whom subsequently elected to be repatriated to France rather than fight on as exiles. For thirty-five minutes that afternoon, Churchill described the operation to the Commons, concluding with some of his greatest phrases: ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.’

That evening he found time to dispatch brief notes, thanking the King for withdrawing his objections to Brendan Bracken’s membership of the Privy Council on the grounds of character; and to former prime minister Stanley Baldwin, expressing appreciation for a letter offering good wishes. Churchill apologised for having taken a fortnight to respond. ‘We are going through v[er]y hard times & I expect worse to come,’ he wrote; ‘but I feel quite sure better days will come; though whether we shall live to see them is more doubtful. I do not feel the burden weigh too heavily, but I cannot say that I have enjoyed being Prime Minister v[er]y much so far.’

The German drive on Paris began on 5 June. Anglo–French exchanges in the days that followed were dominated by increasingly passionate appeals from Reynaud for fighters. Five RAF squadrons were still based in France, while four more were operating from British bases. The war cabinet and chiefs of staff were united in their determination to weaken Britain’s home defence no further. On 9 June, Churchill cabled to South African premier Jan Smuts, who had urged the dispatch of more aircraft, saying: ‘I see only one sure way through now, to wit, that Hitler should attack this country, and in so doing break his air weapon. If this happens he will be left to face the winter with Europe writhing under his heel, and probably with the United States against him after the Presidential election is over.’ The Royal Navy was preoccupied with fears about the future of the French fleet. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, declared that only its sinking could ensure that it would not be used by the Germans.

Yet perversely, and indeed indefensibly, Churchill continued to dispatch troops to France. The draft operation order for 1st Canadian Division, drawn up as it embarked on 11 June, said: ‘The political object of the re-constituted BEF is to give moral support to the French Government by showing the determination of the British Empire to assist her ally with all available forces…It is the intention…to concentrate…in the area North and South of Rennes…A division may have to hold 50 miles of front.’ At a meeting of ministers in London that day, Dill was informed that a study was being undertaken for the maintenance of a bridgehead in Brittany, ‘the Breton redoubt’. As late as 13 June, Royal Engineers were preparing reception points and transit camps on the Brittany coast, to receive further reinforcements from Britain.

Churchill recognised the overwhelming likelihood of French surrender, yet still cherished hopes of maintaining a foothold across the Channel. It seemed to him incomparably preferable to face the difficulties of clinging on in France, rather than those of mounting from Britain a return to a German-defended coast. He sought to sustain French faith in the alliance by the deployment of a mere three British divisions. He seemed unmoved by Mussolini’s longexpected declaration of war on 10 June, merely remarking to Jock Colville: ‘People who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii again.’ The private secretary noted his master’s bitter mood that day. On the afternoon of 11 June, Churchill flew with Eden, Dill, Ismay and Spears to the new French army headquarters at Briare on the Loire, seventy miles from Paris, to meet the French government once again. The colonel who met their plane, wrote Spears, might have been greeting poor relations at a funeral. At their destination, the Château du Muguet, there was no sense of welcome. At that evening’s meeting of the Supreme War Council, after the French had unfolded a chronicle of doom, Churchill summoned all his powers. He spoke with passion and eloquence about the forces which Britain could deploy in France in 1941 – twenty, even twenty-five divisions. Weygand said dismissively that the outcome of the war would be determined in hours, not days or weeks. Dill, pathetically, invited the supreme commander to use the makeshift British forces now in France wherever and however he saw fit.

The French, with the Germans at the gates of Paris, could scarcely be blamed for thinking themselves mocked. Eden wrote: ‘Reynaud was inscrutable and Weygand polite, concealing with difficulty his scepticism. Marshal Pétain was overtly incredulous. Though he said nothing, his attitude was obviously “C’est de la blague” – “It’s a joke.”’ The harshest confrontation came when Weygand asserted that the decisive point had been reached, that the British should commit every fighter they had to the battle. Churchill replied: ‘This is not the decisive point. This is not the decisive moment. The decisive moment will come when Hitler hurls his Luftwaffe against Britain. If we can keep command of the air over our own island – that is all I ask – we will win it all back for you.’ Britain would fight on ‘for ever and ever and ever’.

Reynaud seemed moved. The newly appointed army minister, Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle, was much more impressed by the prime minister’s representation of himself as an Englishman than as an ally: ‘Mr Churchill appeared imperturbable, full of buoyancy. Yet he seemed to be confining himself to a cordial reserve towards the French at bay, being already seized – not, perhaps, without an obscure satisfaction – with the terrible and magnificent prospect of an England left alone in her island, with himself to lead her struggle towards salvation.’ The other Frenchmen present made nothing of the prime minister’s words. Though courtesies were sustained through a difficult dinner that night, Reynaud told Britain’s leader over brandy that Pétain considered it essential to seek an armistice.

To his staff, Churchill fumed at the influence upon Reynaud of his mistress, the comtesse de Portes, an impassioned advocate of surrender: ‘That woman…will undo everything during the night that I do during the day. But of course she can furnish him with facilities that I cannot afford him. I can reason with him, but I cannot sleep with him.’ For all the hopes which Churchill reposed in Reynaud, even at his best the French prime minister never shared the Englishman’s zest for war à l’outrance. The American Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, reported a conversation with France’s leader earlier that summer: ‘M. Reynaud felt that while Mr C[hurchill] was a brilliant and most entertaining man with a great capacity for organization, his kind has lost elasticity. He felt that Mr C could conceive of no possibility other than war to the finish – whether that resulted in utter chaos and destruction or not. That, he felt sure, was not true statesmanship.’ This seems a convincing representation of Reynaud’s view in June 1940. Like a significant number of British politicians in respect of their own society, the French prime minister perceived, as Churchill did not, a limit to the injury acceptable to the fabric and people of France in the cause of sustaining the struggle against Nazism.

Next morning, 12 June, Churchill told Spears to stay with the French, and to do everything possible to sustain them: ‘We will carry those who will let themselves be carried.’ Yet Britain had no power to ‘carry’ France. Pétain absented himself from the ensuing meeting of the Supreme War Council. His own decision was reached. Churchill raged at news that a planned RAF bombing mission to Italy the previous night had been frustrated by farm carts pushed across the runway by French airmen. Reynaud said that any further such missions must be launched from England. At Briare airfield, Ismay observed encouragingly that with no more allies to worry about, ‘We’ll win the Battle of Britain.’ Churchill stared hard at him and said: ‘You and I will be dead in three months’ time.’ There is no reason to doubt this exchange. Churchill claimed later that he had always believed Britain would come through. He certainly had a mystical faith in destiny, however vague his attachment to a deity. But it is plain that in the summer of 1940 he suffered cruel moments of rationality, when defeat seemed far more plausible than victory, when the huge effort of will necessary to sustain the fight was almost too much for him.

Six months later, Eden confessed to the prime minister that during the summer he and Pound, the First Sea Lord, had privately acknowledged despair to each other. Churchill said: ‘Normally I wake up buoyant to face the new day. Then, I awoke with dread in my heart.’ In the fevered atmosphere of the time, some MPs panicked. Harold Macmillan was among the prime movers in the so-called ‘undersecretaries’ revolt’ by Tories demanding that the old ‘men of Munich’ should be summarily expelled from the government. ‘All this,’ in Leo Amery’s words, ‘on the assumption that France is going out altogether and that we shall be defeated.’ The young turks were squashed.

When so many others were dying, Churchill could scarcely take for granted his own survival. A German bomb, a paratroop landing in Whitehall, an accident by land, sea or air such as befell many other prominent wartime figures, could extinguish him at any time. His courage, and that of those who followed and served him, lay in defying probability, sweeping aside all thought of the most plausible outcome of the struggle, and addressing each day’s battles with a spirit undaunted by the misfortunes of the last. That Wednesday morning of 12 June, his Flamingo hedgehopped home over the lovely countryside of Brittany. Near the smoking docks of Le Havre, the pilot dived suddenly to avoid the attentions of two German planes which were strafing fishing boats. The Flamingo escaped unseen, landing safely at Hendon, but this was one of Churchill’s closest calls. Later in the afternoon he told the war cabinet that it was obvious French resistance was approaching an end. He spoke admiringly of De Gaulle, whose resolution had made a strong impression on him.

Churchill had been back in London less than thirty-six hours when Reynaud telephoned, soon after midnight, demanding a new and urgent meeting at Tours, to which he had now retreated. The prime minister left next morning, accompanied by Halifax and Beaverbrook, driving through the incongruous London summer shopping crowds. He was greeted at Hendon with news that bad weather required a take-off postponement. ‘To hell with that,’ he growled. ‘I’m going, whatever happens. This is too serious a situation to bother about the weather!’ They landed at Tours amid a thunderstorm, on an airfield which had been heavily bombed the previous night, and solicited transport from a jaded rabble of French airmen. Churchill, Beaverbrook and Halifax crowded with difficulty into a small car which took them to the local prefecture, where they wandered unrecognised through the corridors. At last a staff officer escorted them to a nearby restaurant for cold chicken and cheese. This was black comedy. It is not difficult to imagine Halifax’s disdain for the ordeal to which Churchill had exposed him.

Back at the prefecture, the British waited impatiently for Reynaud. It was essential that they take off again in daylight, because the bombcratered and unlit runway was unfit for night operations. At last the French prime minister arrived, with Spears. He told the English party that while Weygand was ready to surrender, it was still possible that he could persuade his colleagues to fight on – if he received a firm assurance that the Americans would fight. Otherwise, would Britain concede that it was now impossible for France to continue the war? Churchill responded with expressions of sympathy for France’s agony. He concluded simply, however, that Britain would sustain its resistance: no terms, no surrender. Reynaud said that the prime minister had not answered his question. Churchill said he could not accede to a French capitulation. He urged that Reynaud’s government should make a direct appeal to President Roosevelt before taking any other action. Some of the British party were dismayed that nothing was said about continuing the fight from France’s North African empire. They were fearful that Reynaud’s nation would not only cease to be their ally, but might join Germany as their foe. They were acutely aware that, even though the French leader still had some heart, his generals, excepting only De Gaulle, had none.

In the courtyard below, a throng of French politicians and officials, emotional and despairing, milled around Churchill as he left. Hands were wrung, tears shed. The prime minister murmured to De Gaulle: ‘L’homme du destin.’ He ignored an impassioned intervention by the comtesse de Portes, who pushed forward crying out that her country was bleeding to death, and that she must be heard. French officials told the assembled politicians that Churchill at this last meeting of the Supreme War Council had shown full understanding of France’s position, and was resigned to her capitulation. Reynaud did not invite Churchill to meet his ministers, as they themselves wished. They felt snubbed in consequence, though the omission changed nothing.

Churchill landed back at Hendon after a two-and-a-half-hour flight. At Downing Street he learned that President Roosevelt had responded to an earlier French appeal with private promises of more material aid, and declared himself impressed that Reynaud was committed to fight on. Churchill told the war cabinet that such a message came as close to an American declaration of war as was possible without Congress. This was, of course, wildly wishful thinking. Roosevelt, on Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s advice, rejected Churchill’s plea that he should allow his cable to be published.

On 12 June, the 51st Highland Division at Saint-Valery was forced to join a local capitulation by troops of the French Tenth Army, to which the British formation was attached. Had an order been given a few days earlier, it is plausible that the troops could have been evacuated to Britain through Le Havre. Instead, they became a sacrifice to Churchill’s commitment to be seen to sustain the campaign. That same day, Gen. Sir Alan Brooke arrived with orders to lead British forces to the aid of the French. Reinforcements were still landing at the Brittany ports on the 13th.

When Ismay suggested that British units moving to France should hasten slowly, Churchill said: ‘Certainly not. It would look very bad in history if we were to do any such thing.’ This was of a piece with his response to chancellor Kingsley Wood’s suggestion a few weeks later, that since Britain was financially supporting the Dutch administration in exile, in return the government should demand an increased stake in the Royal Dutch Shell oil company. ‘Churchill, who objected to taking advantage of another country’s misfortunes, said that he never again wished to hear such a suggestion.’ At every turn, he perceived his own words and actions through the prism of posterity. He was determined that historians should say: ‘He nothing common did or mean upon that memorable scene.’ Indeed, in those days Marvell’s lines on King Charles I’s execution were much in his mind. He recited them repeatedly to his staff, and then to the House of Commons. Seldom has a great actor on the stage of human affairs been so mindful of the verdict of future ages, even as he played out his own part and delivered his lines.

On 14 June, the Germans entered Paris unopposed. Yet illusions persisted in London that a British foothold on the Continent might even now be maintained. Jock Colville wrote from Downing Street that day: ‘If the French will go on fighting, we must now fall back on the Atlantic, creating new lines of Torres Vedras behind which British divisions and American supplies can be concentrated. Paris is not France, and…there is no reason to suppose the Germans will be able to subdue the whole country.’ Colville himself was a very junior civil servant, but his fantasies were fed by more important people. That evening, Churchill spoke by telephone to Brooke in France. The prime minister deplored the fact that the remaining British formations were in retreat. He wanted to make the French feel that they were being supported. Brooke, with an Ulster bluntness of which Churchill would gain much more experience in the course of the war, retorted that ‘it was impossible to make a corpse feel’. After what seemed to the soldier an interminable and absurd wrangle, Churchill said: ‘All right, I agree with you.’

In that conversation, Brooke saved almost 200,000 men from death or captivity. By sheer force of personality, not much in evidence among British generals, he persuaded Churchill to allow his forces to be removed from French command and evacuated. On the 15th, orders were rushed to Canadians en route by rail from the Normandy coast to what passed for the battlefront. Locomotives were shunted from the front to the rear of their trains, which then set off once more for the ports. At Brest, embarking troops were ordered to destroy all vehicles and equipment. However, some determined and imaginative officers laboured defiantly and successfully to evacuate precious artillery. For the French, Weygand was further embittered by tidings of another British withdrawal. It seems astonishing that his compatriots did nothing to impede the operation, and even something to assist it.

Much has been written about Churchill’s prudence in declining to reinforce defeat by dispatching further fighter squadrons to France in 1940. The contrary misjudgement is often passed over. Alan Brooke understood the prime minister’s motive – to demonstrate to the French that the British Army was still committed to the fight. But he rightly deplored its futility. If Dunkirk represented a miracle, it was scarcely a lesser one that two weeks later it proved possible to evacuate almost all of Brooke’s force to Britain through the north-western French ports. There were, in effect, two Dunkirks, though the latter is much less noticed by history. Churchill was able to escape the potentially brutal consequences of his last rash gesture to Reynaud, because of Brooke’s resolution and the Germans’ preoccupation with completing the destruction of the French army. Had not providence been merciful, all Brooke’s men might have been lost, a shattering blow to the British Army’s prospects of reconstitution.

On 15 June, at Churchill’s behest Dill telephoned Brooke on a weak, crackling line, and told him to delay evacuation of 52nd Division from Cherbourg. In London there were renewed hopes of clinging to a foothold in France, though these had no visible foundation in reality. The French anyway discounted all such British aspirations. Brooke was exasperated. He told the CIGS: ‘It is a desperate job being faced with over 150,000 men and a mass of material, ammunition, petrol, supplies etc, to try to evacuate or dispose of, and nothing to cover this operation except the crumbling French army…We are wasting shipping and precious hours.’ Next day, London grudgingly agreed that the 52nd Division could continue returning to Britain. Yet administrative confusion persisted. Some troops were embarked at Le Havre for Portsmouth, only to be offloaded at Cherbourg and entrained for Rennes. A ship arrived at Brest on the morning of the 18th, bearing artillery and ammunition from England. At a dozen north-west French ports, tens of thousands of British troops milled in chaos, many of them lacking orders and officers.

German preoccupation with the French army alone made it possible to get the men and a few heavy weapons away, amid chaos and mismanagement. There were skirmishes between British and enemy forces, but no fatal clash. Between 14 and 25 June, from Brest and Saint-Nazaire, Cherbourg and lesser western French ports, 144,171 British troops were successfully rescued and brought home, along with 24,352 Poles and 42,000 other Allied soldiers. There were losses, notably the sinking of the liner Lancastria at a cost of at least 3,000 lives;* but these were negligible in proportion to the forces at risk – two-thirds of the numbers brought back from Dunkirk.

It is hard to overstate the chaos of British command arrangements in France during the last three weeks of the campaign, even in areas where formations were not much threatened by the Germans. Two trainloads of invaluable and undamaged British tanks were gratuitously abandoned in Normandy. ‘Much equipment had been unnecessarily destroyed,’ in the angry words of Maj.Gen. Andrew McNaughton, commanding 1st Canadian Division. Though the war had been in progress for almost nine months, Lt.Gen. Sir Henry Karslake, commanding at Le Mans until Brooke’s arrival, wrote in a report: ‘The lack of previous training for our formations showed itself in many ways.’ Men of the 52nd Division arrived in France in June with equipment issued two days earlier, never having fired their anti-tank guns or indeed seen a tank. Karslake was appalled by the perceived indiscipline of some regular units, even before they were engaged: ‘Their behaviour was terrible!’ Far more vehicles, stores and equipment could have been evacuated, but for administrative disorder prevailing at the ports, where some ships from England were still being unloaded while, at nearby quays, units embarked for home. The commitment to north-west France represented a serious misjudgement by Churchill, which won no gratitude from the French, and could have cost the Allies as many soldiers as the later disasters in Greece, Crete, Singapore and Tobruk put together.

While the horror of Britain’s predicament was now apparent to all those in high places and to many in low, Churchill was visibly exalted by it. At Chequers on the warm summer night of 15 June, Jock Colville described how tidings of gloom were constantly telephoned through, while sentries with steel helmets and fixed bayonets encircled the house. The prime minister, however, displayed the highest spirits, ‘repeating poetry, dilating on the drama of the present situation…offering everybody cigars, and spasmodically murmuring: “Bang, bang, bang, goes the farmer’s gun, run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run.” ’ In the early hours of morning, when US ambassador Joseph Kennedy telephoned, the prime minister unleashed upon him a torrent of rhetoric about America’s opportunity to save civilisation. Then he held forth to his staff about Britain’s growing fighter strength, ‘told one or two dirty stories’, and departed for bed at 1.30, saying, ‘Goodnight, my children.’ At least some part of this must have been masquerade. But it was a masquerade of awesome nobility. Churchill’s private secretary Eric Seal thought him much changed since 10 May, more sober, ‘less violent, less wild, less impetuous’. If this was overstated, there had certainly been an extraordinary accession of self-control.

On 16 June the war cabinet dispatched a message to Reynaud, now in Bordeaux, offering to release France from its obligation as an ally to forswear negotiations with Germany, on the sole condition that the French fleet should be sailed to British harbours. De Gaulle, arriving in London, was invited to lunch with Churchill and Eden at the Carlton Club. He told the prime minister that only the most dramatic British initiative might stave off French surrender. He urged formalising a proposal for political union between France and Britain over which the cabinet had been dallying for days. Amid crisis, these desperate men briefly embraced this fanciful idea. An appropriate message, setting forth the offer in momentous terms, was dispatched to Reynaud. Churchill prepared to set forth once more for France, this time by sea, to discuss a draft ‘Proclamation of Union’. He was already aboard a train at Waterloo with Clement Attlee, Archibald Sinclair and the chiefs of staff, bound for embarkation on a destroyer, when word was brought that Reynaud could not receive them. With a heavy heart, the prime minister returned to Downing Street. It was for the best. The proposal for union was wholly unrealistic, and could have changed nothing. France’s battle was over. Reynaud’s government performed one last service to its ally: that day in Washington, all the French nation’s American arms contracts were formally transferred to Britain.

During the night, it was learned at Downing Street that Reynaud had resigned as prime minister and been replaced by Marshal Pétain, who was seeking an armistice. Pétain’s prestige among the French people rested first upon his defence of Verdun in 1916, and second upon an ill-founded belief that he possessed a humanity unique among generals, manifested in his merciful handling of the French army during its 1917 mutinies. In June 1940 there is little doubt that Pétain’s commitment to peace at any price reflected the wishes of most French people. Reynaud, however, probably committed a historic blunder by agreeing to forsake his office. Had he and his ministerial colleagues chosen instead to accept exile, as did the Norwegian, Belgian and Dutch governments, he could have prevented his nation’s surrender of democratic legitimacy, and established French resistance to tyranny on strong foundations in London. As it was, he allowed himself to be overborne by the military defeatists, led by Pétain and Weygand, and denied himself a famous political martyrdom.

A British sergeant named George Starr, who escaped from the Continent through Dunkirk, belatedly reached home in Yorkshire on 18 June. He found his father listening to the radio announcement of France’s surrender. The Starr family had for many years run a travelling circus on the Continent. George’s father switched off the set, shook his head and said: ‘The French will never forgive us for this.’ His son could not understand what he meant. Later in the war, however, George Starr spent three years as a British agent with the French Resistance. He enjoyed ample opportunity to explore the sense of betrayal harboured by many French people towards Britain, which never entirely faded.

De Gaulle, Reynaud’s army minister, almost alone among prominent Frenchmen chose to pitch camp in London, and secured the evacuation of his wife. The war cabinet opposed his request that he should be permitted to broadcast to his people on the BBC. Churchill however, urged on by Spears, insisted that the renegade – for so De Gaulle was perceived by many of his own people – should be given access to a microphone. The general’s legal adviser, Professor Cassin, enquired of his new chief what was the status of his embryo movement in Britain. De Gaulle answered magnificently: ‘We are France!…The defeated are those who accept defeat.’ The general had an answer, too, to the problem of establishing his own stature: ‘Churchill will launch me like a new brand of soap.’ The British government indeed hired an advertising agency, Richmond Temple, to promote Free France. De Gaulle would need all the help he could get. Few Frenchmen, even those evacuated to Britain from the battlefield, were willing to fight on if their government quit. De Gaulle asked the captain of the French destroyer Milan, which carried him across the Channel, if he would serve under British colours. The naval officer answered that he would not. Most of his compatriots proved like-minded. ‘Mr Churchill finds that there are not enough French and German bodies to satisfy him,’ declared a sulphurous front-page editorial in the Paris paper Le Matin, in one of its first issues after the surrender. ‘We ask if the British prime minister has lost his head. If so, what a pity that our ministers did not perceive it sooner.’ The paper went on to denounce De Gaulle, and to accuse the British of fomenting revolt in France’s overseas empire.

In 1941 and 1942, the prime minister would be obliged to preside over many British defeats, and indeed humiliations. Yet no trauma was as profound, no shock as far-reaching, as that which befell him in his first weeks of office, when the German army destroyed France as a military power, and swept the British from the Continent. Henceforward, the character of the war thus became fundamentally different from that of 1914–18. All assumptions were set at naught upon which Allied war policy, and Churchill’s personal defiance of Hitler, had been founded. Whatever Britain’s continuing capabilities at sea and in the air, since September 1939 it had been taken for granted that the British Army would confront the Nazi legions alongside the French, in the frankly subordinate role demanded by its inferiority of numbers – just nine divisions to ninety-four French on the western front. The British Army could never alone aspire to dispute a battlefield with the Wehrmacht, and this knowledge dominated British strategy.

It was hard for many people, even the highest in the land, to absorb the scale of the disaster which had befallen Allied arms, and which now threatened to overwhelm Britain. Alan Brooke was struck by a Churchillian observation about human nature. The prime minister said that the receptive capacity of a man’s mind was like a three-inch pipe running under a culvert. ‘When a flood comes the water flows over the culvert whilst the pipe goes on handling its 3 inches. Similarly the human brain will register emotions up to its “3 inch limit” and subsequent additional emotions flow past unregistered.’ So it now seemed to Brooke himself, and to a host of others. They perceived that a catastrophe was unfolding, but their hearts could not keep pace with the signals from their brains about its significance. Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary on 15 June: ‘My reason tells me that it will now be almost impossible to beat the Germans, and that the probability is that France will surrender and that we shall be bombed and invaded…Yet these probabilities do not fill me with despair. I seem to be impervious both to pleasure and pain. For the moment we are all anaesthetised.’

Another eye-witness, writer Peter Fleming, then serving as an army staff officer, identified the same emotional confusion: ‘This period was one of carefree improvisation as far as most civilians were concerned. It was as though the whole country had been invited to a fancy-dress ball and everybody was asking everybody else “What are you going as?” A latent incredulity, and the fact that almost everybody had more than enough to do already, combined to give problems connected with invasion the status of engrossing digressions from the main business of life…The British, when their ally was pole-axed on their doorstep, became both gayer and more serene than they had been at any time since the overture to Munich struck up in 1937.’

British casualties in France were large in relation to the size of the BEF, but trifling by comparison with those of the French, and with the infinitely more intense struggles that would take place later in the war. The army lost just 11,000 killed and missing, against 120,000 French dead. In addition, 14,070 British wounded were evacuated, and 41,030 BEF prisoners fell into German hands. The loss of tanks, artillery and weapons of all kinds was, of course, calamitous. It is a familiar and ill-founded cliché that the 1940 British Expeditionary Force was ill-equipped. In reality it was much better supplied with vehicles than the Germans, and had good tanks if these had been imaginatively employed. When Hitler’s Field Marshal Fedor von Bock saw the wreckage at Dunkirk, he wrote in astonishment: ‘Here lies the material of a whole army, so incredibly well-equipped that we poor devils can only look on with envy and amazement.’ The BEF was driven from Dunkirk after relatively light fighting and very heavy retreating, because it lacked mass to change the outcome of the campaign once the French front was broken, and was outfought by German formations with better leadership, motivation and air support. The British Army was now, for all practical purposes, disarmed. Almost a thousand RAF aircraft were gone, half of these fighters.

But Britain had human material to forge a new army – though not one that alone could ever be large enough to face the Germans in a Continental war – if only time was granted before it must fight again. An American correspondent reported home that Londoners received news of the French surrender in grim silence rather than with jokes or protestations of defiance. The Battle of France was over, Churchill told the British people on the following night. The Battle of Britain was about to begin. The position of Churchill’s nation on 17 June was scarcely enviable. But it was vastly better than had seemed possible a month earlier, when the BEF faced annihilation.

* Estimates that as many as 8,000 people perished on the Lancastria are rendered implausible by the overall casualty figures for the campaign in France, which show a total British loss of life of only 11,000.

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